Littlecroft

Description

House. 1899 by Sir Edwin Lutyens for Mrs Bowes Watson. Orange/red brick below with whitewashed roughcast above under hipped, plain tiled roofs. Two storeys built into a hillside with a basement to the rear where the ground drops away.

Tall stacks, wide multiple cross-ridge stacks to left and right, smaller double stacks to left of centre. Triple hipped roof ranges end on and parallel, with shuttered glazing-bar casement fenestration. One first floor window to each end range and projecting turret windows on squinches to angles. Stilted-arch lunette windows in ground floor, below the level of the road with a thin, ribbed-brick keystone reaching up to link with the brick stringcourse over the ground floor.

Central range projects with further turret windows on the angles and half-hipped dormers in sides of roof. Block-rusticated brick frontispiece with ogee voussoirs to keystoned arch over recessed double doors under round head. Original brass door furnishings survive. Left hand return front:- Two windows on both floors with shutters and tile-on-edge lintels. Right hand return front:- square break to left with one window on each floor. Rear:- Three casements across the first floor, outer canted bay windows below. Central door in shuttered margin lights. (Historic England, list entry 1029317)

Littlecroft is a small house on Guildown. It stands alongside the road winding round the hill, and the ground slopes to the south so very rapidly that what seems a low cottage on the entrance front (Fig. 81) becomes a tall house on the garden side (Fig. 83). The little polygonal oriel windows at the angles of walls show how strong Norman Shaw’s influence was in 1899. The house is on a small scale, and simply equipped, but the nature of the plan, with its front entrance near the level of the bedroom floor, indicated that the staircase should be somewhat emphasised. The reception-rooms open from the lower hall (Fig. 84), and the staircase is used, therefore, by every visitor. (Weaver, 1913, p.47)

LITTLE CROFT, uphill from The Grange, is by Lutyens, 1899, small and rather different from his other Surrey work, the garden front symmetrical with three hipped roofs, tiny oriels on the corners (of the kind used a few years earlier at the Ferry Inn, Argyll, for Princess Louise) and generous bow windows floated out at first floor. The entrance side better, with a big doorway in a stepped arch of careful brickwork. Entrance at first floor, descending to the ground floor on the garden front by top-lit central stair (cf. Red House, Godalming). Memorial in the garden by Mary Watts to a Zeppelin raid in 1915. (O’Brien et al., 2022, p.426)

Bibliography

Historic England. Littlecroft. [Online] Available from: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1029317

Weaver, L. (1913) Houses and Gardens by E L Lutyens. London: Country Life.

O’Brien, C., Nairn, I. and Cherry, B. (2022) Surrey. Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Also Cited In

Listing Grade

II

Listing Reference

1029317

Client

Mrs Bowes Watson