It never ceases to amaze me how much I learn from my students. One day this past semester I was teaching a course on the Decorative Arts after 1800 and discussing the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. I was showing the students some pictures of the architecture and furniture of Charles F. A. Voysey, when all of a sudden one of my students became very excited and said her hometown clubhouse was built in homage to Voysey. I was stunned because outside of architecture students and lovers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who would ever have heard of Voysey, let alone believe a clubhouse hand been built echoing his philosophy, and his style. She promised to bring me an article on the clubhouse. My post is based on that article by Susan Sully, published in “Legends, The Magazine of Gracious Island Living.”

If you are a northerner like me, you need to know that Kiawah Island is off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. The clubhouse was designed by Bernard Wharton of Shop Reno Wharton Architects of Greenwich, Connecticut who was inspired by the philosophy of Voysey and the Arts and Crafts Movement in England. He studied Voysey’s buildings and interpreted their shapes and materials for his own design. Voysey celebrated the beauty of nature and believed in fitting a building into its landscape. The Cassique clubhouse melds into the colors and textures, the coastal grasses and flowering bushes, the sand, stone and shell of the low country landscape. The facade of Cassique looks similar to Norney House, one of Voysey’s most distinctive houses in Surrey, which he completed in 1897. Characteristic of Voysey’s architecture are the stucco walls and sloping charcoal gray slate gables. Two wings frame an entrance dominated by a massive double door of hand-hewn wood and a large elliptical window. Vertical emphasis is provided by the two-story buttresses, which bolster the doors and the walls, another typical characteristic. Voysey used large banks of windows on his houses to frame views of the surrounding landscape but the abstract geometry of the large windows at Cassique signify a modern sensibility in a structure that otherwise looks back to an English country house.

A whole group of outstanding designers worked with Wharton and his partner, Jerry Hupy to create interiors that reveal a passion for excellent hand-craftsmanship and attention to the smallest detail which carry out the Arts and Crafts philosophy. The interiors create a feeling of Old World charm combined with modern comfort. The club’s multi-roomed restaurant is called Voysey’s in homage to this renowned English Arts and Crafts Architect.