Details
CAMBRIDGE
667/0/10134 CLARKSON ROAD
23-APR-04 3
II
House. 1958 by Trevor Dannatt for Peter and Janet Laslett. Ground floor external wall of Holco lightweight concrete blocks, painted green/black, with loadbearing cross walls; upper floor with vertical cedar boarding. Flat roof, with single projecting stack. Rectangular building with projecting upper floor. Part open plan with interesting section in its use of half levels.
Scandinavian-influenced modern style. Entrance front with hardwood front door with two glazed panels, letterbox in transom to side, timber up-and-over garage door to the right. Upper storey with tall narrow window to left and part of low drawing room angled window to right. Garden front with fold-back triple timber-framed windows to central ground-floor living room window to left, with copper band brought down from roof interrupting parapet line. Three further floor to ceiling windows to right with fixed lights below, casement central section and top-hung hopper. Between second and third windows a narrow window.
Interior. Hallway with diagonally-set black tile floor leads left into former playroom with stable door and red-painted plaster recess, right to WC and built-in coat cupboard, ahead into dining room with grey flecked rubber tile floor extending into kitchen, which has wall-to-wall mahogany counter with inset sink and two flush fronted drawers below. Stair with planked hardwood treads, raked risers and plank string from dining room to half-landing, deep handrail supported on iron bar and middle rail with pin connections to widely spaced iron balusters screwed to string. Three concrete steps down to boiler and storage space. Half-landing has fully-glazed screen with glazed door to living room, with unplastered white-painted brick cross-wall incorporating fireplace and recess over. Other walls clad in horizontal cedar boarding which carries across landing. Four steps rise to bedroom passage with skylight. Bedroom doors flush doors with fanlights over. Bedroom adjoining bathroom has built-in wardrobe cupboards forming low soffit by doorway.
Trevor Dannatt was introduced to the historian Peter Laslett by a former fellow student, Rachel Rostas. It is the most important of Dannatt's houses, and the only one to survive in its original state in England. Dannatt studied under Peter Moro, and subsequently worked for him and, Leslie Martin, on the Royal Festival Hall (Lambeth, grade I), and the Laslett House has some affinities with Moro's slightly earlier house for himself in Blackheath (Greenwich, grade II*). Both place the principal accommodation on the upper level, which is expressed as a slightly projecting box clad in richer materials - here timber. However, Dannatt's detailing is bolder, and the house is a pure rectangle where Moro's has a split section with a clerestorey; here extra height is given to the living room subtly by concealing a half level over the garage and using a dip in the site. The plan differs, too, in that the staircase is central and open, so that there are powerful diagonal views through the house between the living room and kitchen.
Sources
Architectural Design, March 1959, p.110
Penelope Whiting, New Houses, 1964, pp.154-7
Philip Booth and Nicholas Taylor, eds., Cambridge New Architecture, 1970, p.189
Trevor Dannatt, Trevor Dannatt: Buildings and Interiors, 1972, pp.25
