Lowicks, Frensham, Surrey

Now known as Woodlake.

The entry in Pevsner's Surrey (with Charles O'Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry, 2022) reads:

LOWICKS HOUSE. On the E side of Frensham Common, and hard to get at. A simple and very typical Voysey house, of 1894-5 for Emslie J. Horniman M.P., for whom Voysey later designed the interiors of Garden Corner, Chelsea. Exactly like an enlarged lodge: single mass, slender, battered corner buttresses, battered chimneys, Westmorland slate roofs, white roughcast walls and gridded windows. The outstanding success is the way the eaves of the hipped roof are carried away from the walls on scrolled iron brackets and crisply cut by flat-roofed wall-head dormers at first floor, leaving a frieze-like expanse of walling all round. Larger dormer above the N entrance – door hood held up by elaborate ironwork stay – with half-timbering and half-hip. Extra dormers high up for the attic room. Inside, a small N entrance lobby, now open to the formerly separate living hall with its corner brick fireplace and window seat; a more generous drawing room in the SW corner extending into a polygonal W bow, with simple fireplace of columns and integral writing desk to one side. Playroom behind this with (later) square bay to the r. of the entrance. The carved corbel of the fireplace mantel is a face in profile, said to be Voysey’s own. The stair rises from the entrance hall around thin screen-like balustrades. On the S front the seating bay for the lounge hall was flanked by a porch to the garden and trellis veranda for the drawing room (now enclosed); on the other side was originally the pantry and kitchen, subsequently made into the dining room with its own loggia of columns. The small NE service wing at right angles was originally a single-storey room for a manservant, subsequently extended for kitchen use in alterations to the house and outbuildings by Voysey in 1898, 1904, 1907 and 1911. The GARDENS, one of the few designed by Voysey, have gone; a thin wall remains to the E side of the former kitchen garden with arched openings and doors of ironwork with heart motifs. SUMMERHOUSE of 1911, with tall tent roof and weathervane; the base is slate bricks, emblematic of Voysey’s prejudice for the material even in southern England. The wider situation is delightful in a grassed clearing with a large lake in front and pine woods all around; the simple, low-toned house fits it like a glove.