Anatomy of a House No.25: Sewell's Orchard, Tewin

Anatomy of a House No.25

Sewell's Orchard, Tewin, Hertfordshire
1936
Mary Crowley 

The Garden front of the center house of the three at Tewin.

The work of female architects was few and far between in interwar Britain. We have covered the house designed by artist Dora Gordine in Kingston on a previous Anatomy of a House blog, and there were others such as Justin Blanco White, Norah Aiton and Betty Scott. One female architect who would prove to be the most influential of those who practiced in the 1920s and 30s was Mary Crowley. Her work designing schools in the post war years, alongside husband David Medd, first for Hertfordshire County Council and then for the Ministry of Education, would help transform schools from the regimented Victorian-era layout to a more flexible, child-centred approach. But it is her house design we are interested here, and we will explore the group of three houses she designed at Sewell’s Orchard in the village of Tewin, Hertfordshire

Crowley was born in Bradford on 4th August 1907. Her father, Ralph, was the Chief Medical Officer for the Ministry of Education and was a Quaker, two strong influences on Mary’s future career. Mary attended the progressive Bedales school in Hampshire, a coeducational secular establishment where Mary would become Head Girl. She later attended the Architectural Association, where she met other young women studying architecture such as Judith Ledeboer, Jessica Albery and Justin Blanco White. After passing her qualifications, Crowley worked in the office of Louis De Soisson in Welwyn Garden City, where her family had moved in 1921. It was nearby that Crowley would design and build a terrace of three houses on a plot of land bought by her parents. Mary’s mother thought the plot of land was the right one for them, especially as Sewell had been a name in their family.

The three houses seen in their landscape.

The three houses that Mary designed were to house her parents, her sister Elfrida and her husband Cecil Kemp and the Miall family, all Quakers. Kemp was the head architect for the Miners Welfare Commission and the National Coal Board, designing modernist-influenced pithead baths at sites such as Snowdon Colliery in Kent. Kemp, and Mary’s friend from the AA, John Brandon Jones, assisted Crowley with the drawings and details of the house, but they were all her own design. Mary had taken a trip to Scandinavia in July 1930 as part of her architectural studies, and this proved to be influential on the design for Sewell’s Orchard.

A plan of the houses in their grounds

Most modernist houses built in Britain up to that point took their influence from the International Modern style as seen in the work of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and other heroic figures from the continent. Crowley's houses however took their cue from a gentler strain of modernism as found in Northern Europe, with less emphasis on white walls and monolithic concrete and more on brick, tile and timber. The three houses are largely separate, with two connected by their garages, with mature trees and a vegetable garden in the shared grounds behind. The houses have sloping, monopitch roofs finished in blue pantiles with the facades on the southerly garden side having overhanging eaves. The windows in the houses were constructed from metal casements with wood frames. The bricks are a mixture of yellow local stock from nearby Hertingfordbury and blue brick used for a plinth. The houses were arranged with open plan ground floors with the dining and living areas flowing into each other. 

The living room of the second house. Image from RIBApix.

Crowley worked with Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger from around 1934, assisting him as he set up his practice in England. She worked on the terrace of houses at Willow Road in Hampstead, which would be completed in 1939 and be home to Goldfinger and his wife Ursula throughout the rest of their lives. That project has some similarities in approach with the Tewin scheme, with both sets of houses showing how modernist design can fit into their environments and use local materials. The pair also produced a design for a prefabricated nursery school in the mid-1930s, something that wasn’t taken up at the time, but would prove influential to both of them.

In 1941 Crowley joined the education department of Hertfordshire County Council under the leadership of Chief Education Officer John Newsom, who wanted to bring the county's educational buildings into the modern world, and became part of the newly formed architects department in 1946. As part of the department, Crowley helped produce innovative designs for new schools, using prefabricated units to build schools quickly, and including commissioned artworks and landscaped grounds in the designs. A good example of Crowley’s work for Herts is Burleigh School in Cheshunt, built from 1946, and designed with David Medd and Bruce Martin using a modular system to enable quick construction.

5 Pennyfeathers Lane, Digswell (1954) David and Mary Medd. Image from RIBApix.

She married Medd in 1949, who she had met whilst working for Goldfinger, and the couple would work for Herts and live in a house they designed together in the village of Digswell in 1953. The house on Pennyfeathers Lane also takes its inspiration from Scandinavian modernism, with its single storey, stock brick structure, formed of two halves connected by a covered walkway. The couple then went to work for the Ministry of Education overseeing the design of the new schools throughout the country, such as Woodside Jr School in Amersham (1957). The houses at Tewin were listed in March 1982, recognized as a pioneering group of houses,with a design “which would not have appeared out of place thirty years earlier”. The Medd's house in Digswell was also listed in April 2007, with the listing noting its unchanged interior and careful integration in the landscape. Mary Medd had passed away in 2005, with her husband David dying in 2009. 

Burleigh Primary school, Cheshunt (1948) Herts County Council. Image from RIBApix