Building record 1472200000 - Studio at 'Four Hedges', Whiteleaf

The studio was designed c 1933 by Francis Skinner and Valentine Harding, partners in the newly-formed practice of Tecton, for the artist Clare Leighton and her partner the radical writer H N Brailsford. It is thus one of the first buildings to be built in Britain by this highly significant architectural practice, formed by the Russian emigré Berthold Lubetkin in 1932.
Clare Leighton was an artist, writer and illustrator of note, specialising in woodcuts. Her best known work, 'Four Hedges', a chronicle of the garden year at the house, was created in the studio and, in 1932 while presumably at Four Hedges, Leighton also wrote and illustrated 'Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts'. Her nephew, writing in 1992, recalled ‘A short figure in an azure smock, silhouetted against the vast north window of her studio at Four Hedges, Clare seemed to the six-year-old boy mysterious and powerful' (Stevens, A and Leighton, D 1992 Clare Leighton Wood Engravings and Drawings Oxford: Ashmolean Museum,13).
The studio is constructed of a light timber frame clad in shiplap boarding and is raised at first floor level supported on slender steel posts, originally above a void at the western end, and now underbuilt in brick. It has an asymmetrical pitched roof, the northern face filled by a continuous studio window. The entrance is set back under an open porch reached by an external spiral stair placed at the angle. Windows, abutting the corners of the building, are timber casements; the north-facing roof light has been replaced or repaired. A full-length single-storey brick lean-to block has been added against the north elevation and a flat-roofed parking bay created to the east (B1).