September 2009 » book review

Country House Chameleon

Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses
by Gavin Stamp
The Monacelli Press, New York, NY; 2009
192 pages; hardcover; 200 duotones; $65
ISBN 978-1-58093-237-0

Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn

Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), the prolific British architect, had virtually no formal education except for a few years at a London art school. Without degrees or mentors, he nonetheless mined precedents as varied as Shropshire ruins and Michele Sanmicheli's rusticated Renaissance Doric columns. In reissuing this 2001 monograph about Lutyens' country houses, Monacelli has done a favor for architects seeking ideas for synthesizing historical narratives into buildings that tell new stories.

Alongside insightful and lively text by architectural historian Gavin Stamp, the volume reprints black-and-white photos that Country Life commissioned between 1900 and 1931. The 22 projects profiled do not represent the architect's full spectrum; Country Life editors were conservative. "Houses that were considered eccentric," Stamp writes, "seem not to have been photographed." He has nonetheless assembled images that convey Lutyens' restless imagination.

Stamp speculates that Lutyens' creativity derived partly from childhood boredom. "Ned," as his intimates called him, "had rheumatic fever when young and was considered too delicate" to attend school along with his numerous siblings. He was one of 13 children of oddly matched parents: Mary Theresa Gallwey, a Protestant Irish policeman's daughter, and Charles Henry Augustus Lutyens, an unsuccessful painter of German ancestry (the original family name was Lütkens).

Edwin spent much of his childhood at loose ends in Surrey, roaming construction sites, visiting carpenters' workshops, befriending craftspeople, and sketching buildings in accurate perspective. As his daughter Mary recalled in a 1980 biography of her father, "He would carry about with him in his wanderings a small pane of clear glass and several pieces of soap sharpened to fine points. Looking through the glass at some detail of a building he wanted to learn about he would trace it with the soap." Such colorful quotes from family memoirs, and from critics through the ages, spice the whole text.

Mary also noted that her father had "no real interests outside his creative work." By age 20 he had set up a solo practice and started cultivating the nouveaux riches who would be his best early patrons – although he eventually built up his client circle to include princesses and the British Viceroy in Delhi. He was a portly, bespectacled workaholic with a strange home life: his wife Emily Lytton, an earl's daughter, became a celibate Theosophist after their fifth child was born. Lutyens meanwhile piled on projects renowned for their unpredictable designs.

Stamp vividly describes the houses' extremes of austerity or picturesqueness. With equal flair, Lutyens fashioned cornice-less faceted planes of granite for Castle Drogo on a remote Devon cliff, and stacked bays, gables, balconies and corbelled chimneys at Fulbrook House in suburban Surrey. The book details the hefty construction budgets (Lutyens was notorious for going over budget) and quaint-sounding materials specs like Pulborough stone, Horsham roof slates and white chalk bands wittily striping brickwork. Stamp finds room for gossipy thumbnail biographies of clients too. We learn which aristocratic suffragette ruined her health while enduring force-feedings in jail, which Parliamentarian was a "compulsive golfer," and which ex-wife of Cary Grant practiced the "cult of the tub" by having her Oxfordshire bathroom lined in pink onyx.

Partly because Lutyens' patrons and projects were so diverse, critics over the years have vehemently disagreed about his legacy. Modernists have argued that "Lutyens had perverted the course of modern English architecture," Stamp reports, while traditionalists sometimes fault the architect for "too vigorous pursuit of the picturesque." Stamp himself leans somewhat Modernist – he would have preferred more "distinctively modern domestic architecture balanced between tradition and abstraction." But he nonetheless evaluates each design on its own stylistic merits. At the domed Classical palace in Delhi, "Everywhere there is invention, and controlled fantasy," he writes, while the caliber of Lutyens' gabled houses ranges in his estimation from "accomplished games with the Picturesque vernacular language" to "an unsatisfactory essay in streamlined-'olde-worlde-oaky'-Tudor."

This thickly illustrated book allows readers to form their own opinions. "Houses by Lutyens present a wide and sometimes paradoxical range of images, allowing very different interpretations," Stamp concludes. "There is something in them for everybody."  

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