To describe James Gorst's Suffolk house (called Wakelins) as beautiful, suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.
Credit: Mark Luscombe-Whyte/Interior Archive
Gorst's building is a reminder of the truth in the French writer Stendhal's aphorism: 'Beauty is the promise of happiness'.
This restoration project is a beautiful example of how past and present can complement each other. The use of contrasting materials, such as richly textured oak and bare concrete, has created a truly stunning effect.
What I love about Gorst's house is the way it mixes the old and the new. For example, it uses both concrete and oak. It would be hard to name two materials with less in common than this pair. The strength, longevity, and nobility of oak have long furnished the English with an idealised image of their own character. It is against backgrounds of richly textured oak that generations of gentlemen have read the Daily Telegraph in their clubs and dons have lunched in Oxbridge colleges. It was in oak trees that Robin Hood escaped the law and Charles II hid from Cromwell's armies. It was English oak that provided Westminster Abbey with its ceiling and Nelson's navy with its ships. Around polished panels of the wood, there therefore hover associations of rural life, aristocracy, history, the smells of leather and whisky - not to mention romantic notions of nationhood.
We are far from all of this with concrete, a material which embodies speed, economy, and, in its reinforced variety, brute might. It is a quintessentially modern, democratic medium whose rediscovery by architects in the early 20th century made possible many of the overtly functional structures of the technological age, including grain silos, garages, tower blocks, and warehouses.
However, like an intelligent host faced with a couple of dinner guests from sharply opposed worlds, Gorst helps these two elements to acknowledge each other's virtues and surmount their mutual suspicion. He manages to reconcile them by making no attempt to disguise or minimise their differences. Unembarrassed to leave his concrete bare and unafraid to emphasise its poverty and starkness, Gorst encourages us to discover a new kind of beauty in its grey massing. At the same time, he lets us openly savour and celebrate the antique pleasures of oak, showing to full advantage the warm tones, clarity, and striated grain with which time endowed it. This building delivers an elegant essay on how past and present can coexist and complement each other. In doing so, it sketches for us the dimensions of an ideal contemporary Englishness.
This doesn't of course mean that the owners of the house will never suffer. They may get fed up, shout and be overwhelmed by anxiety, but at least their building speaks to them of honesty and ease, of a lack of inhibition, a memory of the rural past and a faith in the future.
