Sir Edwin Lutyens
The Arts and Crafts Houses
David Cole
Early Projects 1890–1895
32 Munstead Place 1891
38 Chinthurst Hill 1893
52 Lascombe House 1894
56 Fir Tree Cottage/The Hollies 1895
Emerging Maturity 1896–1897
60 Munstead Wood 1896
70 Ferry Inn 1896
78 Fulbrook House 1897
96 Berrydown Court 1897
112 Witwood 1897
116 Red House 1897
122 Hazelhatch 1897
126 Orchards 1897
140 Sullingstead 1897
152 Wood End 1897
156 The Pleasaunce 1897
166 Goddards 1898 & 1910
188 Afton Cottages 1898
190 Le Bois Des Moutiers 1898
214 Tigbourne Court 1899
228 Littlecroft 1899
234 Overstrand Hall 1899
244 Homewood 1900
254 Fishers Hill 1900
260 Great Houses 1901–1906
262 Marshcourt 1901
290 Grey Walls 1901
304 Woolverstone House 1901
312 Abbotswood 1901
320 Little Thakeham 1902
340 Daneshill House 1903
348 Millmead House 1904
352 Forest House 1905
356 Folly Farm 1906 & 1912
382 High Game 1907–1909
384 New Place 1907
390 Barton St Mary 1907
394 Middlefield 1908
402 Ashby St Ledgers Cottages 1908
406 Great Maytham Stables 1909
410 La Maison Des Communes 1909
416 Imperial Visions 1910–1938
418 Castle Drogo 1910
432 Great Dixter 1910
440 Abbey House 1913
450 Park Farm House 1917
454 Penheale Manor 1920
460 Plumpton Place Lodges 1927
466 Halnaker Park 1938
474 Selected Planning Diagrams 484 Notes 495 Bibliography 496 Index
Notwithstanding this, almost without exception, his country houses were built not with large estates or farmland, but were instead intended as weekend retreats or retirement houses for recreation and entertainment and the refined enjoyment of the long golden afternoons of those last halcyon years of the Edwardian era.
Arts and Crafts and the Surrey Vernacular Lutyens brought together two essential philosophies; firstly, the nineteenth-century principles of design truth, as annunciated by Ruskin and A.W.N. Pugin, embodied in the Gothic Revival work of Pugin himself, Butterfield, Street and Webb, then taken up by the following generation of Arts and Crafts architects; and secondly, Lutyens’s abiding love of the picturesque Surrey vernacular – a love formed in childhood and matured through his partnership with Gertrude Jekyll. Lutyens’s vernacular-style houses faithfully reflected Pugin’s call for the frank expression of a building’s construction and the craftsman’s work. However, in contrast to the more literal, even raw, application of the principle in the work of many of his Arts and Crafts contemporaries such as Ashbee and Prior, in his pursuit of effect, Lutyens adopted a more flexible approach, embracing the opposing strategies of both exaggeration and disguise. His expressed timber beams and brackets were often unnecessarily massive, and junctions heavily articulated in traditional dowel and tenant joint detailing; whereas, unsightly downpipes and, in later work, structural steel, were characteristically concealed within wall cavities or the soffits of the eaves.
In spite of such liberties, and his increasing use of Classical elementation, Lutyens work essentially embraced the vernacular pillars of the Arts and Crafts, in his use of the local – materials, craftsmanship, and construction methods. Notwithstanding this, Lutyens was essentially a designer, not a craftsman such as Lethaby, Ernest Gimson, or Ernest Barnsley. As Christopher Hussey wrote, Lutyens never lapsed into ‘homespun’;17 moreover, as a designer, his passion, and his gift, was pure building design and accordingly, although he extended his scope to highly inventive and authentic designs of furniture, fittings and fixtures, he declined the popular Art and Crafts preoccupation of decorative designs, and design of all objects in the home, as practised by Voysey and Mackintosh.
Site: Conceptualisation, Overture and Landscape as Form
Lutyens’s preliminary design drawings and sketches18 reveal a highly intuitive conceptual design process, whereby once having appraised his client’s functional and programmatic requirements for a house – and upon inspecting the site and its context – Lutyens was able to swiftly form in his mind a well-resolved floor-planning configuration and three-
LEFT Goddards, Surrey, designed in 1898 as a ladies charitable holiday house: west aspect showing the glowing colours and textures of Lutyens’s layered dual roof materiality, and the radial geometry of the courtyard garden by Gertrude Jekyll.
Whilst there is no surviving documentary evidence of Miss Jekyll’s formal involvement in the garden design of Munstead Place, nevertheless, given her acquaintance with the Heatleys and, more significantly, Lutyens’s beautifully structured garden design bearing her very distinctive hallmarks, it is highly likely she would have been a party to it. The house was built by the local builders Mitchell Bros of Shalford, and was completed in 1892, the year memorialised in the house’s cast iron rainwater hoppers.11
OPPOSITE PAGE ABOVE Front entrance, showing the Bargate stone walling, the entry porch braced oak framing, and the inscriptions ‘CDH’ to the left-hand rainwater hopper and ‘1892’ to the right, the client’s initials and the year of completion.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT Shaped profile soffit main stair in the hall ceiling.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM RIGHT Restored brick and stone hall corner fireplace.
BELOW View from the south, showing the servants’ wing to the right of the gabled entrance front, and the restored Dutch Garden as designed in Lutyens’s sketchbook.
Lascombe House
Surrey, 1894
Lascombe House was built to the south-west of the village of Puttenham, about 5 miles south-west of Guildford. The site was located in a gently rolling countryside setting, with views of the Hogs Back to the north, and distant views south towards Hankley Common and Hindhead. Lutyens’s design response was a highly picturesque essay in the Surrey vernacular, blended with a series of original Lutyens touches and, in some respects, a distinctly innovative compositional design. The client was Lt. Col. Augustus Spencer,1 a retired army officer, and Lutyens’s commission, in addition to the main house, included a number of outbuildings on the estate, an entry lodge, stables and a coach house. Lascombe House has been described in chronologies of Lutyens’s works as an alteration project, however the work was a rebuild of an existing structure, and thus may be regarded as a complete Lutyens house.
Lutyens’s design was an L-shaped footprint, with the long section of the L orientated east/west, about 10 degrees off the axis, and the shorter section projecting to the north, defining an informal arrival forecourt. Lutyens designed an intricate composition of red-tiled roof forms, with two pairs of two-storey gabled-forms – one pair to the east aligned north/ south, and one pair to the west aligned east/west. Interposed with these forms was a three-storey gabled-form aligned north/south, and – set in the north-east vertex of the L – a short projecting 45-degree angled twostorey gable defining a recessed front entry. Inside, the front door opened into an entry hall, which linked all three principal ground-level reception rooms – each with elevated south and west views of the gardens2 and the Surrey countryside beyond – and the main stairs across the hall, the service spaces and offices located further through to the left. Lutyens’s main stair was designed as a perfect-square in plan, which incorporated a series of broad, shallow flights forming a rhythmical sequence of landings, with Classical balusters and a timber Tuscan column set on a corner newel supporting the corner of the void, the whole composition recalling the stairs at Munstead Place, designed three years earlier. At first level, the stairs opened into a broad gallery overlooking the void and connecting to all the main upstairs bedrooms. Lutyens’s interior designs were refined and understated, with well-crafted joinery, and two eloquently designed timber-panelled corner fireplace surrounds in the hall and the drawing room.
The elevations of the building were of highly contrasting designs. The ground-level walling was constructed in red brickwork, with the jettied,
RIGHT North entry elevation, a picturesque, superbly balanced composition of jettied gabled forms, with a continuous horizontal moulding demarcating the two levels, the taller gable engaging the massive red-brick chimney, counterbalanced to the left by the lower paired gables, the jettied gable to the right supported by diagonal oak brackets.
The west entrance elevation (pictured following pages) is a glorious composition, with hidden complexities: by disengaging the west portion of the south wing at first level, Lutyens cleverly created an alignment of the west face of the main stair on the right with the west face of the north-west projecting wing on the left, thus creating the appearance of the bulk of the west end of the south wing of having been grafted on to a pre-existing symmetrical E-shape form, perhaps at a later date, the ground-level floor plan of the house giving no clue to this architectural sleight of hand. The right-hand projecting tile-hung turret, which contained an upstairs bathroom (added later in the design process) actually thus appears as ‘a later addition to a later addition’. And finally, the curious, somewhat incongruous vertical truncation of the roof to the extreme right of the elevation, corresponding to the face of the left-hand bookend gable of the south elevation around the corner, (bringing to mind, in an inverse form, the left-hand roof form of the south elevation of Berrydown Court Lutyens was about to design), seems to complete the ambiguity of this rich narrative. The west elevation of Fulbrook House is a pièce de résistance of pure Lutyens choreographed subtlety and illusion; notwithstanding this, it is a beautifully balanced and reposeful composition, the graceful long descent of the left-hand gable down to door-head height recalling aspects of Voysey’s work at the time.9
OPPOSITE PAGE Views down and up the main stairs. Fulbrook House was Lutyens’s first house to feature a proliferation of Classical elements within the interior spaces, particularly throughout the hall which incorporated a sequence of Ionic pilasters and Classical arched openings, and also the main stairs which incorporated an ingenious mutually perpendicular composition of semicircular openings at both levels.
ABOVE Front entry porch, a form Lutyens repeated in a number of future houses.
FOLLOWING PAGES Front west elevation, sublimely picturesque and ingenious; Lutyens created a false impression of the right-hand built form of the turret and the two canted bay windows of having been added later to an ‘original’ symmetrical E-shaped form; the graceful descending roof on the left recalls Voysey’s work at the time.
OPPOSITE PAGE TOP LEFT Door to the south garden, an arched strapped and studded design, set into the return of the projecting east wall of the sitting room.
OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT Front door, showing the Cooks’ initials and the date of the house, 1897, carved in the oak doorhead; the front door was originally recessed.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM RIGHT Fireplace in the ground level music room, showing the oval window to the right, and Lutyens’s use of a Classical profile moulding in the surrounds, which he had by then adopted as typical in a number of his houses.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT Open front entry portico, set directly over the steps leading down to the north forecourt; the timber Tuscan columns supporting the simple hip roof were an early exterior use of a Classical motif by Lutyens.
BELOW South-west view of the 1903 addition, showing Lutyens’s skilful wrapping of elements around the building: red brick pilasters break through the dentilled cornice extension forming raised capped parapet blocks, and sash windows, matching those within the south dormers, are punched into the weatherboarding under the gable apexes.
OPPOSITE PAGE TOP LEFT View looking south down the main stair, showing in the foreground the short flight of steps leading up to the first level corridor, and also Lutyens’s typical orientation of oak plank flooring in blocks of opposing directions. The door off the intermediate landing, seen to the right of the photo, was designed with massive stone dressing surrounds thus pronouncing the entrance into the minstrels’ gallery of the music room. The end vista shows the three tall octagonal oriel windows that so strongly annunciate the architecture of the projecting main stair and front entry wing of the building.
OPPOSITE TOP RIGHT View from the open doorway of the downstairs drawing room, showing Lutyens’s metalwork designs for the hardware of the double doors, and an intricate Lutyens design in timber where the top of the jamb was shaped to fit the chevron profile design of the faces of the double doors.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT View down the flight of secondary stairs which lead from the ground level hall up to an open upstairs anteroom; the stairs were set within a solid internal wall tunnel lined on both sides with aqua glazed ceramic tiles.
OPPOSITE BOTTOM RIGHT Detail of aqua glazed ceramic tiles to stairs.
ABOVE View of the hall, looking south to the main stairs, showing the delicate counterbalance of the sturdy oak and stone materiality, against the delicate natural lighting effect of Lutyens’s typical open floor joist design of the ceiling. The doors to left and right of the stairs are to the front vestibule and to a cupboard below the stairs, the arched double doors to the right to the music room.
from the left, a pair of three-storey shallow canted bay windows (recalling those in the west elevation of Fishers Hill of the previous year) which served the ground level drawing room, a bold projecting rectangular bay serving the hall, and a partially projecting two-storey hipped dormer, its split level eaves creating a transition between the parapeted wall portion to the left side of the elevation and the main hipped roof eaves wrapping around the house.
Lutyens worked with Gertrude Jekyll on the design of Marshcourt’s gardens. The design was founded on a formal open space to each of the north and south of the house, set within the arms of the architecture – to the north, a paved rectangular entry forecourt bound on either side by hedges, and to the south a squarely proportioned rectangle of lawn, both spaces on axis with their respective main entries and punctuated with centrepieces, a geometric plat of lawn to the north and a chalk sundial to the south. Lutyens subtly misaligned the entry axes to the north and south, in a manner similar to that at Homewood, designed the previous year. Jekyll and Lutyens designed the gardens to embrace the natural slope of the site and, in a broader context, to soften the force of the architecture against the pastoral landscape of its hillside setting. The three principal north, west and south sides of the house were unified by a series of wide Portland stone paved paths, formal garden beds, pergolas, and Classicalbalustraded descending circular and rectangular terraces and garden walls, in combination providing beautiful outdoor amenity and entertainment spaces for Herbert Johnson and his house guests. The same knapped flint and red brick materiality of the architecture was incorporated into the garden elements, as broad plates of herringboned brickwork within the Portland stone paths, with coursed brickwork and flint checkerboards in the faces of the retaining walls. The three-dimensional design of the gardens to the south was very cleverly resolved. A series of north/south
OPPOSITE PAGE Main stair, Jacobean in style, with pegged timbers and chalk infill blocks, looking south from the billiard room through a keystoned chalk arch.
LEFT AND BELOW End elevations of the diagonally opposite north-west and south-east projecting wings, which Lutyens designed as identical compositions of a central canted two-storey bay window capped by a half-hipped roof.
rectangular ‘outdoor rooms’, each directly integrated with the elevational elements of the architecture, were extended from the house – anticipating a similar configuration at Folly Farm designed more than ten years later – whereby each plate was set at a progressively lower level, from east to west: the main lawn axially aligned to the arched door set at ground level, a wide path on axis with the rectangular two-storey projecting bay set at an intermediate level, and the sunken water garden, aligned on axis with the paired canted three-storey bay windows, set down further from a small lawn at lower ground level of the house. Never before had Lutyens and Jekyll achieved such harmonious integration of architecture and garden design.8
A quarter of a century after Marshcourt was designed, Herbert Johnson invited Lutyens back in 1926 to design a large ballroom, annexed to the house.9 A massive hip-roofed double-cube form with a new service wing and courtyard extending to the southeast, the new ballroom was designed in the same style and materiality as the main house. In comparison to the richness of the original house, the interior design of the grand double-height space was somewhat understated, with a number of highly eloquent design features. The space featured fine oak wall panelling, a trio of purpose-designed double-hoop chandeliers, and an aisled screen of coupled marble Doric columns along the north side supporting an organ gallery above. Most remarkably, on the west wall, was an exquisite doubleheight chalk and timber chimney-piece, with giant floor to ceiling leaded windows in chalk structural frames to either side, the northwest window of the pair incorporating mirrored glazing, concealing solid wall behind.
Goddards, Surrey, 1898 & 1910. Window detail north elevation.
High Game
1907–1909
‘In architecture Palladio is the game! It is so big – few appreciate it now, and it requires training to value and realise it. The way Wren handled it was marvellous. Shaw has the gift. To the average man it is dry bones, but under the hand of a Wren it glows and the stiff materials become as plastic clay.
Edwin Lutyens, in a letter to Herbert Baker, 15 February 1903.1
In Lutyens’s famous letter to Baker, he went on to describe the design process of working with the Classical Orders as a ‘high game’.2 As Hussey wrote of Lutyens’s words to Baker in 1903, usually reticent and somewhat inarticulate in writing about his art, Lutyens here revealed, with absolute clarity, the full force of his passion and conviction for the Classical, and his subtle appreciation of its disciplines.3 With such resolute declarations, for Lutyens now, there would be little going back.
Given Lutyens’s inherent driving ambitions, the words in his subsequent letter of 1904 indicate what would have been, in all likelihood, another factor in Lutyens’s conversion to the Classical – the quest for ‘grander’ commissions. By its nature and definition, the Arts and Crafts architectural movement was confined largely to residential or, in some instances, ecclesiastical work – as opposed to civic or commercial projects;4 moreover, a vernacular-style building was inevitably limited in its scale and also, realistically, precluded from a central urban context. In 1907, Lutyens was one of eight leading architects invited to participate in the limited architectural design competition for the new London County Hall building on the south bank of the Thames, his ultimately unsuccessful design of a grand, twin-domed design a faithful reflection of the Classical essence of Jones and Wren.5 Lutyens had invested enormous time and intellect in the competition, and in a letter to Baker in May 19086 he expressed his bitter disappointment. At this point in his career, Lutyens was primed for grand scale urban work. In this sense, it could be said, it was inevitable the Arts and Crafts manner could not hold him.
In 1908, Lutyens designed a large expansion of the red-brick early 18th-century house Temple Dinsley in Hertfordshire, very much to the
style of the original, and two new red-brick houses, each of a similar restrained Neo-Georgian-style character, Middlefield in Cambridgeshire and Chussex in Surrey. The following year he designed his largest country house to date, Great Maytham in Kent, in a grand Neo-Georgian manner, with strong stylistic references to Wren. Ironically, despite each of these four houses being distinctly refined essays in Lutyens’s Classical manner, Lutyens was evidently unwilling, or perhaps too busily occupied with the volume of work in his practice at this time, to repeat the Classical extravagance of Heathcote two to three years previously.
The period also saw the continuation of design work in alterations, additions and new cottages, together with two exceptional commissions, in a vernacular manner, each unique in quite different ways; in 1908 a row of six thatched cottages in Ashby St Ledgers, designed in a highly picturesque manner, immediately recalling that of John Nash’s Blaise Hamlet designed nearly a hundred years earlier, and the following year, a second house in France with a uniquely three-pointed-star form floor plan, designed for his client at Le Bois des Moutiers ten years earlier.
Lutyens’s other main involvement through these years was with the Hampstead Garden Suburb, as previously discussed, where he was invited to design the central buildings – St Jude’s Anglican Church, The Free Church, the vicarage and manse buildings, the Institute’s north-west wing, and the housing to the west side of Erskine Hill and North Square. The project would occupy him for three years and, working with the master planners Parker and Unwin, Lutyens’s designs established the suburb’s essential framework and fundamental architectural character.
SIR EDWIN LUTYENS: THE ARTS AND CRAFTS HOUSES brings together in new, wide-format, colour photography a definitive collection of 45 of Lutyens’s great Arts and Crafts houses, in which he ingeniously blended the style of the Arts and Crafts movement with his own inventive interpretation of the Classical language of architecture. The book features 575 all-new current photographs of the houses and a fresh interpretation of Lutyens’s enduring architectural genius.
