Home Place, Kelling
Home Place, also called Voewood, is an Arts and Crafts style house in High Kelling, near Holt, Norfolk, England, designed (1903–5) by Edward Schroeder Prior.
[2] Home Place is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of house design of the Arts and Crafts movement.
More than almost any other building of the period the house fulfils the ideals for architecture developed by John Ruskin and William Morris.
In the designing and building of Home Place many of his philosophical ideas found physical expression.
Its design and construction were characterised by the use of radical planning and forms, innovative technologies, such as the use of reinforced concrete, extensive external decoration, a distinct building philosophy involving craftsmanship and the use of quality local materials and the integration of the building and its interiors with the garden and its surroundings.
He was born in Water House, Walthamstow, which had been the childhood home of William Morris, and educated at Eastbourne College.
Both at Eastbourne and Oxford he was a noted athlete, although he suffered periodically from unknown health problems.
The money used to pay for the house - £60,000 - most probably derived from a stake in the family business, now run by his elder brother Frank.
The house is constructed of mass concrete made of local lime and the materials derived from the site.
Electrical services were executed under contract, but the main construction work was supervised and labour and materials purchased by Prior's site clerk, Randall Wells (1877–1942) and Mr Blower, a local bricklayer.
Prior believed that contract systems would result in "only the most mechanical expressions of design" being brought to fruition.
Randall Wells had been discovered by William Lethaby in 1902 and had acted as his resident clerk of works at All Saints' Church, Brockhampton, Herefordshire.
It is believed that Mrs Lloyd, concerned about the possibility of contracting TB from her neighbours in the sanatorium, decided that she could not remain in residence.
The area contained within the splay faced the gardens, with the northern of the wings acting as the entrance, with a two-storey porch and daylight basement.
The entrance, through oak doors, leads into a six-sided hall up a straight flight of Hoptonwood stone stairs into an octagonal lobby.
The main staircase lies to the left filing the triangular space generated by the butterfly plan.
A corridor with an open oak beam roofs leads from the lobby to the east wing on the garden side.
The cloister space has now been incorporated into the library by glazing the original open arches with metal framed doors and windows.
French windows originally led into the covered cloister, which was subsequently glazed and incorporated into the room.
The corridor connecting the two wings is slung over part of the double height great hall along the west side, acting as a minstrels gallery.
The third floor of the central block contains further bedrooms in the roof space, lit by large dormer windows.
Electrical services were provided at the time of building and included lights, bells, telephones and hot water.
Photographs taken just after completion reveal that a simple approach was taken to the treatments of the interior, with the extensive use of white distemper and untreated or oiled and blackened oak and waxed timber floors, very much in the idiom of the medievalism of Webb's Red House, designed for Morris.
The corridor to the west wall has a heavily beamed and ribbed oak roof, again originally blackened and polished.
Scratch plates were designed by Prior in brass, probably with the "tree of life" pattern he used in other buildings.
The French windows to the garden terrace were full height and oak framed, with small glazing panels.
The garden at Home Place was admired by Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Lawrence Weaver, who described and illustrated it in their book Gardens for Small Country Houses; "The stepped scheme at Home Place, Holt, designed by Professor E.S.
The house has undergone a programme of sympathetic restoration and is currently owned by the London bookseller Simon Finch.
