Building of the month

September 2002 - Space House, East Grinstead

Space House, East Grinstead, West Sussex
Text by Kate Sclater with background information provided by Richard Constable of Foggo Associates (www.foggo.com) and sales information and images provided by Mike Sparks at Hamptons International.

Space House in East Grinstead was designed by Peter Foggo and David Thomas in 1963-4. The pair had studied together in Liverpool, graduating in 1957, and from 1959 to 1965 designed a number of private houses together as Peter Foggo David Thomas Architects. This was a part-time practice which they ran between 8pm and midnight and at weekends. Both subsequently became directors of Arup Associates, where their work is better-known.

Their first complete house was commissioned in 1959 via Kenneth Capon of Architects’ Co-Partnership, the practice where Foggo was working at the time. George Scott, the client for that house, had seen Capon’s own weekend house in a magazine and by pure chance bought a small woodland plot next door to it at Bosham Hoe in Sussex before he realised where the Capon House was.

Capon himself was too busy to design a house for Scott, so passed the job to Foggo as a spare time project which he carried out with Thomas. The Scott house (now called Sorrel House) was extended by Foggo and Thomas in 1965 and again by Thomas working with Foggo Associates in 1999. It has won an RIBA award this year and was featured in the February 2002 RIBA Journal.

Space House at East Grinstead, illustrated here, was one of the commissions which followed Sorrel House over the next six years, and was itself the prototype for three houses built about a year later at Holyport, near Windsor.

The house has been owned by the same family from 1968 until the present day.