Stockbroker Tudor is a term with pejorative beginnings. It is a domestic architectural style which has been reviled for being pompous and inauthentic however it has some genuine links to the Arts and Crafts – a design movement of ongoing interest to Kennedy Nolan.
The Arts and Crafts movement fascinates us because of the complexities contained in its incipient Modernism parallel to a preoccupation with the crafts of making. During the twentieth century, the next time that Modernism became preoccupied with craft and making was Brutalism – also a movement of ongoing interest to this practice.
The Stockbroker Tudor House investigates a reconciliation of high Modernism and the Tudor revival elements of the Arts and Crafts movement - on first glance seemingly incompatible. The resulting new building fabric has the clarity of functionalist planning and flexibility afforded by modern technology, also the relevance of contemporary aesthetics such as de-limited horizontal space and breaking down of interior/exterior thresholds.
The detail and resolution of the architecture acknowledges the reality of domestic construction– that it is hand-made - and expresses this through ostensible elements of carpentry, metalwork, tiling and glazing and through colours and forms which touch on the memory of ecclesiastical and pre-Raphaelite preoccupations of Arts and Crafts design.