Charles Francis Annesley Voysey in Cumbria

C.F.A. Voysey was a prominent Arts & Crafts Movement architect and designer, born in Yorkshire in 1857. He studied with J. P. Seddon until 1874 and then studied for a year under George Devey. He established his own practice in 1882.

Voysey’s early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in a simple Arts & Crafts style but he is renowned as the architect of a number of notable country houses.

His houses featured white rough rendered walls with horizontal ribbon windows and huge pitched roofs, and are recognised for their simplicity, originality and total abandonment of historical tradition. His style and works are considered formative works in the evolution of the Modern Movement in architecture.

Examples are: Perrycroft, Herefordshire, 1893; Annesley Lodge, Hampstead, London, 1896; Merlshanger, Hog’s Back, Guildford, 1896, Norney, Shackleford, 1897; The Orchard, Chorley Wood, 1900, which he designed for himself.

Voysey received the RIBA Gold Medal in 1940, and died in Winchester in 1941.

There are two excellent examples of Voysey’s design at Ghyll Head, just south of Bowness-on-Windermere, with roughcast walls and massive rendered stacks on sweeping slate roofs.

Broad Leys, Voysey’s masterpiece according to Pevsner, on a terrace overlooking Windermere, has a more formal garden front with three two-storey curved bows breaking into a big hipped roof. It is now the headquarters of the Windermere Motor Boat Club, and featured in the film ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’.

Moor Crag, to the South, set above the road, in landscaped grounds by Thomas Mawson has a similar great hipped roof, but contained each side by roughcast gables and sweeping right down almost to ground level at the West end.

In 1908 Voysey designed Littleholme, in Kendal, for Arthur W Simpson, the ‘Arts and Crafts’ woodcarver and designer. It is a small, square stone house with a front door recessed into a porch with massive beams and an enormous semicircular arch.

Places in Cumbria designed by Charles Voysey :
Moorcrag, Ghyll Head, Bowness-on-Windermere	1898
Broad Leys, Ghyll Head, Bowness-on-Windermere	1898
Littleholme, 103 Sedbergh Rd, Kendal	1908