Vernacular To A Fare-Thee-Well

In Charnwood Forest, Stoneywell was imagined by British Arts & Crafts designer Ernest Gimson for his brother’s family. Built with local materials and labor, it is indigenous and spare, attesting This Is How to Live. 

- Brian D. Coleman

RAMBLING, UNASSUMING, FACING AWAY from the road, Stoneybrook is an iconic house of the English Arts & Crafts movement. The architect and furniture designer Ernest Gimson built it in 1898–99, in collaboration with architect and master builder Detmar Blow, for Gimson’s brother Sydney and his family. The Gimson family were prominent Leicester industrialists; Ernest designed homes for several siblings. Stoneybrook is the most unchanged of them.

Inspired by William Morris’s call for a return to craftsmanship and a simpler life, Ernest designed a vernacular cottage that was one with the landscape. Sited so that it nestles into a rocky bank, the house’s eleven rooms zigzag over seven levels within its earthy setting, and it was built purposefully with local labor and materials. Following the Z-shape of the plan, windows and roofline step downwards, following the hill’s contours. Stones were gathered from the land, occasionally supplemented with a few from local dry-laid walls (rocks reportedly were liberated when a cart was backed into the old walls, which were then rebuilt without the most desirable stones). Enormous stone lintels and, later, roofing slates came from the abandoned Swithland slate quarries nearby.

The undressed stones are left natural on the exterior, but parged and whitewashed inside. Large structural timbers prepared off site follow the irregularities of the plan, attesting to the well-planned design.