Thursday, 16 September 2010

Orchard House, Chorleywood, Charles Voysey

The_Orchard_Elevation_Charles Voysey didn’t like being called a pioneer of modern architecture, but he was.

Voysey_noline He didn’t start the spatial revolution that so many twentieth-century architects did so well, but he did strip back needless frippery from the English House and stress the honest materials and the craft of his houses, which usually featured white pebble-dashed walls, prominent chimneys, huge pitched roofs and windows grouped into “ribbons.”

PaintedtempusattheOrchard1899 This was his own house, designed in 1899 for Chorleywood, Hertfordshire—about ten miles west of London. Poet laureate John Betjeman said  “I think it was the parent of thousands of simple English houses.”  And so it was—which is why it might be so hard now to see it with the eyes startled with which startled Edwardians might have seen it.Orchard_Ground_PlanThe_Orchard_Upper_Plan

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2 comments:

sagenz said...

ah - so voysey is the originator of the pig fuck puss sucking cheap dogshite shitboxes put together in the crappiest way possible with the tackiest gaudiest camel spit ornaments that blight the modern english housing estate and are an offence to any sense of architectural taste. Why did Betjeman not call for their destruction.

Go ahead and delete that I made my point.

Peter Cresswell said...

"Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough,
It isn't fit for humans now..."

No, pretty sure Voysey doesn't get a mention.