Cornwell, Oxfordshire

Vernacular, but not as we know it

When in 1939 the architect Clough Williams Ellis came to Cornwell in Oxfordshire to work on the manor house, adding a ballroom to the existing building, he also remodelled many of the cottages in the village. As the creator of the whimsical Italianate village Portmeirion in Wales, Williams Ellis might have transformed Cornwell’s Cotswold limestone cottages into something from the realms of fantasy. But he was more restrained than that, following the brief of his client, Mrs Anthony Gillson, who instructed him ‘to maintain the traditional appearance so far as possible or might seem desirable, while contriving up-to-date interiors within the ancient husks’.*

Apparently employing a local builder with a pedigree going back to the time of Christopher Wren, Williams Ellis preserved the typical features of the Cotswold cottages and added more in the same vein. The flat canopies over the doorways, with their attractive scrolled brackets, for example, are a common feature of local vernacular buildings but the ones in my photograph were added in Williams Ellis’s remodelling of c. 1939. The unusual alteration to these particular houses, however, is the pair of large sloping buttresses, which show the architect introducing a bigger, bolder feature than would be usual in a house in a Cotswold village. Whether supports of this size and bulk were actually needed, I don’t know, but they certainly catch the eye. They also have the effect of lending some shade and privacy to the doorway between them, something that has been increased by the surrounding planting. The result is charming and pleasingly eccentric without in anyway being offensive to lovers of Cotswold vernacular architecture, tradition and innovation hand in hand.

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*Christopher Hussey, Country Life, 1941, quoted in Cornwell Conservation Area Character Appraisal, accessed online, 21 May 2025