My stepfather, Bryan Thomas, who has died aged 95, was an architect and designer who was responsible for the design of many houses in north-east Essex during his long career.
Bryan’s practice also designed schools, churches, community centres, a Quaker meeting room and buildings at Essex University. The largest of his churches stands in Alresford, Essex, where he also designed and built two “upside-down” houses in the 1970s. There, bedrooms on the ground floor and living rooms on the first floor look across fields to the River Colne. Bryan delighted in and celebrated natural materials, using wood, stone, brick and clay tiles in his buildings. Danish purity of design was a enduring influence on him.
Born in India, he was the son of Ruth (nee Rowley), a nurse then a housewife, and Reginald Thomas, an engineer posted to the country. Along with his brother, Colin, he did his secondary education at the New School in Darjeeling, set up for children marooned in India by the second world war. When his family moved to the UK at the end of the war, he went to Worthing Art School in Sussex and then did five years of training at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. After national service in the RAF, in the early 1950s he began working for a series of London architects before returning to Essex and setting up his own practice in Colchester in 1957.
His clients included artists, teachers, doctors, clergy and a judge. In 1960 he designed a house for a local apple farmer; later, the surrounding orchards became the world-famous garden created by the “farmer’s wife”, Beth Chatto.
In 2020 he was somewhat perturbed when one of his houses (built in 1961 in Colchester), featured on Channel 4 as the baddy in the series Ugly House to Lovely House. He was gratified when people contacted him afterwards to say they preferred his original design.
I have lived in and helped build several of Bryan’s buildings, and would say that his ingenious use of space and light make them exciting, enjoyable and functional spaces. He finally retired from architecture in 2019, aged 91.
Bryan’s ’s first marriage, in 1954 to Pauline Venton, ended in divorce in 1973. His second wife, Wendy Foster, whom he married in 1975, died in 2021.
He is survived by four sons, Adam, Micheal, Crispin and Dominic from his first marriage, four stepchildren, me, Emma, Ruth and John, from Wendy’s first marriage, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
