Details
SHAFT ROAD, Combe Down
656-1/68/2003 (East side)
Lodge Style
11/08/72
II*
Detached house. 1909, by Charles Voysey.
MATERIALS: Limestone ashlar, stone Cotswold slate roof.
PLAN: Courtyard house, with entrance porch tower to north-west corner, garage wing projects at north side.
EXTERIOR: Single storey, leaded casement windows with moulded stone mullions and four-centred heads, entrance front has broad plain tower with wide gabled stone porch over pointed arch with triple wave mould, to high plain splayed plinth, and studded plank door with decorative strap hinges. To left are three and two-light windows, under moulded drip course stopped to carved angel, to right, carrying shield with date 1909. Further left lower unit with crenellated parapet, and return wall, also crenellated to plank door in four-centred head, and garage door. Remainder of building has steep roof on sprocketted eaves. Return right has porch tower with clasping buttress to right, and projecting porch buttress to left, single light at first floor and three-light below, both with stopped drips. Main range has oriel with one:two:twelve-lights to stone roof and moulded eaves and deep stone bracket, single and four-light. Outer gabled end raking buttress, flush with return face and taken up to eaves height: typical Voysey touch. South front has ventilation slit in gable over oriel with one:two:one-lights. To right wide arched opening to deep open lobby on three + three steps, with plank doors in rear wall to corridor. To right three and four-light windows and low arched door, returned to hipped end. East front more restrained, with four windows, to plain square heads, and to hipped return. Four large square stacks, each with plain cornice and high upper stage with flat cap on vertical slits.
INTERIOR: Not inspected. Central courtyard with stone table in centre; dining and drawing rooms with segmental vaulted ceilings and large open hearths to west, bedrooms to east and south, services along north range.
HISTORY: Designed for T. Sturge Cotterell, Bath Alderman and owner of the Combe Down quarries; just as Ralph Allen¿s Prior Park presented the quarry-owner with the chance to display the quality of his goods, so Lodge Style was a flamboyant display of masonry. Its exposed position on a ridge led to the compact, low design which emphasised warmth and enclosure, and in which interior, exterior and setting are all cleverly integrated. Hitchmough described the result as `important as a testament to Voysey¿s personal interpretation of Gothic principles¿. A notable private house of its day, fusing Voysey's characteristically distinctive touch with a host of historicist and vernacular references (inspired by the owner¿s Oxford college, Merton), and showing the continuing possibilities of Bath stone as a building material. It is also a very unusual building for the Bath locality, and one of the very few fairly recent houses in the area by an architect of international standing. Voysey's drawings are in the British Architectural Library (repro. In Jackson, p.235).
SOURCES: 'Country Life', 8 April 1911, 9-11; Julian Orbach, 'Blue Guide to Victorian Architecture in Britain' (1987), 27; Neil Jackson, 'Nineteenth Century Bath. Architects and Architecture' (1991), 233-237; Wendy Hitchmough, `CFA Voysey¿ (n.d.), 204-5, 214-5.
Listing NGR: ST7673262632
