The Regency reinvented

Great House, Dedham, Essex The home of Michael and Lucy Archer | In the first major work of his career, the architect Raymond Erith subtly transformed the Regency idiom to create a design poised between past and present, as Alan Powers explains

- Alan Powers

DEDHAM can seem slightly out of this world—a picture-perfect Essex village where the curve of a long High Street meets the route to the Stour. The river forms the county boundary with Suffolk, where mills and locks provided a lifetime of pictorial memories for the local artist, John Constable. Dedham is ‘a village as lovely as any in East Anglia’, as Arthur Oswald wrote when introducing an article on Great House in COUNTRY LIFE, November 10, 1950.

In 1936, nearly 100 years after Constable’s death, a midnight fire caused by an electrical fault destroyed one of the timber-frame houses towards the western end of the High Street. As had others forming the varied frontages along the south-facing pavement, the original Great House had been modernised, with the regular classical façade of white Woolpit bricks, in about 1750 (a brick is inscribed 1746), obscuring the L-shaped hall house within. Raymond Erith, a young architect who had recently arrived to live in Dedham, hastened to the scene in his dressing gown, concerned for the safety of the house next door, where he was then carrying out repairs for his aunt. Within two years, a replacement house to his designs had arisen on the site that, to a casual eye, looked as if it had been there all the time.