The Twentieth Century Society
70's BUILDINGS
Example 10 - Barley Splatt
From the c20society.org.uk website. Select 'BROWSE EXAMPLES' and then click on the back arrow net to it to get to Example 10. Barley Splatt is only one of ten examples of 1970's architecture selected as typical examples.
Barley Splat is an extraordinarily eccentric house. It was built by Graham Ovenden, a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. This group of painters was originally centred on Peter Blake, and countered the modernism and abstraction of the 1960s with a return to a pre-industrial, Pre-Raphaelite view of art and life. About 1974, Ovenden and his wife Annie bought a smallholding near Bodmin Moor. Doing most of the work themselves, they set out to create a house inspired by the architects of the Gothic Revival and William Morris, gradually extending and decorating an old cottage which remains the core of the structure. The result is more individual than post-modern, with strong Arts and Crafts influences and incorporating C19 architectural fittings and furniture they had bought cheaply before these became fashionable in the late 1960s. Some of the door furniture had been stripped from Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Buffalo, while some came from sets made for the House of Lords.
Drawings were prepared for planning permission by Martin Johnson, who trained as an architect before becoming a maker of lutes and viols, but the essential design work is Ovenden's. The kitchen wing, one of the earliest parts of the remodelling, was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, as is seen in the deep eaves and long horizontal windows. Later parts are more quirkily Victorian in their use of polychromy and patterning, a series of pyramidal roofs surrounding a central tower inspired by William Burges. A near-blind end wall to the cottage has been decorated with motifs in lead and cut granite based on crossbows and bolts.
Inside is still more extensively patterned and High Victorian, based around the arches supporting the central tower. There are squares and borders of tiles set in Carrara marble, wallpaper to designs by Owen Jones and AWN Pugin, and again some architectural salvage, including a lamp and section of iron balustrading from G E Street's convent at East Grinstead.
