Upmeads is a grade-II*-listed[1] house on Newport Road in Stafford, Staffordshire, England, built in 1908 for a local businessman and his wife.
The architect Edgar Wood (1860–1935) came from a wealthy Unitarian background, and practised from around 1885 in the north west from offices in Middleton, and later Oldham and Manchester.
[4][5][6] An example is Banney Royd in Huddersfield (1900–1), a large house with Art Nouveau ornamentation, which employed some technical innovations.
[3][7] He also designed a few highly unusual buildings, notably the expressionistic First Church of Christ, Scientist, Manchester (1903–7),[3][8] which Pevsner characterises as "weird".
[16][17] Sellers designed a small flat-roofed office block for Dronsfield Brothers in Oldham in 1906–8,[3] which Pevsner considers to be of "strikingly similar character" to Upmeads, as well as "just as daring".
Mabel had attended Birmingham School of Art and her brother John Dorman knew the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
[18] Frederick's elder brother H. J. Bostock had commissioned a large house, Shawms, from the local architect Henry T. Sandy, dated 1905, which emulated Voysey's Arts and Crafts style.
[18] The setting was then semi-rural, with nearby listed buildings including Stafford Castle and St Mary's Church, Castlebank (to the west), and Rowley Hall (to the south-east).
[18] The stone door surround is continued upwards through the first floor and onto the attic level, forming a prominent central vertical stripe.
Within this stone band are three-light windows at first floor and attic level, with a carved decorative panel between them, featuring Frederick and Mabel Bostock's initials.
[21] The main full-height entrance hall is at the rear, and is accessed from the garden front; it is groin vaulted and has a slightly projecting, curved balcony in an arched opening at the first-floor level.
[1][18][21] The master bedroom, on the west side, over the drawing room, has a marble fireplace and a single oak-panelled wall, designed by Wood.
[18][23] Although the original formal gardens were truncated when land was sold for building, some elements remain including a parterre, pond, stone-flagged paths and hedging in yew.
[25] The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner describes Upmeads in a 1942 article as an "anachronism" and "the only English private house of the early twentieth century which looks as if it might have been designed about 1935 with a view to expressing the structural characteristics of concrete", with only its "slightly Tudor-looking windows" suggesting its actual date.
[30] Historic England gives Upmeads as an example of an English house built before the First World War featuring "most of the seminal Modern Movement traits";[31] the listing considers it to have a "very advanced design for its date".
[27] Powers describes the style of Upmeads as a "combination of neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian"[27] and the group of flat-roofed houses as "visually simplified late products of the Arts and Crafts Movement".