Warwick Park lies in a conservation area a few minutes from the centre of Royal Tunbridge Wells. A safe Tory seat for more than 100 years, the town has established itself as the spiritual heartland of middle England, where mythical regiments of “disgusted” colonels rail against progress and change.
The road itself does not have the chocolate-box charm of the Pantiles, the colonnaded 17th-century precinct around the corner. But the values of middle England are evident in its comfortable, unchallenging colloquial architecture: a jumble of speculative Edwardian terraces,mediocre 1960s chaletsand the occasional grand 1920s villa.
Number 29 Warwick Park, however, is the sort of place that might well have those colonels reaching for the green ink. Very white, very green and very rectilinear, it’s a modernist house that looks as if it more properly belongs in California than on a suburban English lane.
Matthew and Sara Wintersgill bought the site 12 years ago, with the aim of building the first properly modern house in Tunbridge Wells. Happily, most neighbours failed to be disgusted by the scheme. It was, however, opposed by local planners, and the battle to get the house built turned a project that was supposed to restore Sara’s health into an eight-year struggle that nearly broke them. Even now, four years after the dust has settled, they are still clearly angry.
“We’d been living in a beautiful Georgian house in Greenwich,” recalls Sara, 63, a sculptor. “But I developed a chronic illness – I suffered metabolic collapse – so we thought we should move somewhere cleaner and quieter.” Tunbridge Wells appeared to meet their need for somewhere peaceful within commuting distance of London, so, one Sunday in the summer of 1995, they went to investigate. To their surprise, 36 hours later, they had agreedto buy a mediocre four-bedroom chalet.
“We wanted a house on this street, preferably a 1960s house, because nobody would mind what we did to it,” Sara says. “One came up the very next day. So we drove down again that evening and offered the asking price, £156,000, on the spot.
“The site was perfect. It was heavily wooded, with dramatic stands of Scots pine and cotoneaster. At the back, the garden falls away sharply into a small valley. You can barely see another house, because it’s so leafy, yet we are in the centre of a busy town.”
After selling their four-bedroom home for £250,000, the couple moved in and started designing the new place. It was always going to be modern. “There was never any question of building charming vernacular,” Matthew explains. “Why bother? There’s plenty of that.” It was not, however, meant to be controversial.
Matthew, 58, was running his architectural practice in central London, as well as nursing Sara, so it took two years just to draw up plans. The first hitch came when the planning officer failed to recommend that the initial application be approved, even though the couple believed she agreed with their ideas. The local conservation officer, meanwhile, wanted a more traditional design, in keeping with the surrounding buildings. To the Wintersgills, that meant a “Vicwardian” pastiche with Tudorbethan elements.
The couple acknowledge that the role of planners in conservation areas is difficult: they must protect character without imposing their tastes. But Matthew feels they must shoulder some of the blame for the prosaic nature of much of our domestic architecture. “You rarely see interesting large housing developments. That’s because big developers have the resources to bulldoze through what they want. The only place planners can exercise their power is on smaller developments such as ours.”
In early 1998, the local planning committee rejected the couple’s application. They nearly gave up. Sara was still ill, Matthew was stressed and depressed, and they had moved from a beautiful London house into isolated mediocrity.
Eventually, they rallied and lodged an appeal, doing the paperwork themselves to save on legal fees. “It’s just as well I was ill,” Sara says. “It meant I could spend six months putting together a ‘written representation’ listing all the styles of houses in the area. There were already white houses, houses with balconies, houses with flat roofs. I showed that all we were doing was bringing those existing elements into one building.”
They won the day: in 2000, their plan for a two-storey, four-bedroom, 2,700 sq ft house was finally approved. But there were more problems to come. The tendering process took months, and the quotes, when they did arrive, were a shock: between £350,000 and £450,000, well above their £300,000 budget. “The building boom was inflating prices, so we negotiated with the cheapest to get it down,” Matthew says. And he went back to the drawing board. The green roof went, and the original 9ft 6in ceiling height of the ground floor was cut by 1ft, saving a total of £30,000.
In September 2001, they moved into a rented three-bedroom semi, demolished the chalet and started work. A string of unexpected delays, including no-shows by tradesmen and supply delays, meant the build took 15 months instead of the predicted six.
Today, you might well wonder what all the fuss was about. All you see from the road is a white garage and a curved wall, 7ft high, separating the driveway from the front garden. Once through the stainless-steel front door, however, you understand why the couple persevered. Two large panels of etched glass bricks, flanking the door, bathe the double-height entrance hall in soft, golden light. Ahead looms a white concrete and oak spiral staircase, with a glass-block window behind. The effect is clean, spacious and calming. “People often use the word serene,” Sara says.
To the left are a shower room and a fourth bedroom/study; to the right is the open-plan living room, flooded with light from three full-height windows. Similar apertures feature in the adjoining kitchen, and the sense of space and light is heightened by white walls and the use of brilliant-white Marbella limestone throughout the ground floor and out into the garden. It screams opulence, but cost just £28 per square metre from a local stone merchant.
The living room is furnished in true minimalist style: a couple of Le Cor-busier chairs, a table and a sideboard. Matthew and Sara don’t have children, but surely even they can’t live without the bric-a-brac of everyday life? Of course not. Tap the wall and cupboard after cupboard is revealed: indeed, it seems as if nearly every wall is either a sliding door or hidden storage.
Though the green roof went, other eco-friendly features remain. The timber-frame structure is injected with Warmcel, an insulation product made from recycled newspaper, and clad in a flexible, lightweight render just 2mm thick. “It’s a breathing-wall construction,” Matthew says. “It allows moisture to percolate through the wall while retaining insulation properties.” Rain-water runs off the roof into a 4,000-litre storage tank under the lawn: this is used for the lavatory, the washing machine and the garden. There is a constant-temperature ventilation system, with incoming cold air warmed by the outgoing air through a heat exchanger. All materials are natural: no plastic finishes and no carpet. The result is a low-energy, low-allergy house.
The first floor offers striking views of the rear aspect, and its oak floors are burnished to a gold with organic wax. The landing leads past two bedrooms to a huge sliding door; behind this is the main bedroom suite, with a bathroom and a dressing room. From the bed, all you can see through the double-aspect, full-length windows is branches, leaves and sky. “Sometimes I lie awake in the early morning and count the stars,” Sara says. “It’s unbelievably restful.” Although they have no plans to sell, the Wintersgills would realise a tidy profit from their £500,000 investment if they did: local agents value the home at between £1m and £1.4m.
The house has also become something of a landmark. “The Civic Society shows groups round, and, ironically, even the planners, having fought tooth and nail to oppose it, send people to look at it as an exemplar of sensitive modern design,” Matthew says proudly.
After four years of living in this serene, low-allergy environment, Sara’s health has clearly improved, which for her and her husband makes the fight to build it all worthwhile. “Even though I was ill, and the fuss over building it made me more ill, I now think it’s helping me – and it’s precisely because it is modern, well ventilated, well insulated and almost hypoallergenic that I am recovering,” she says.
