High walls and large windows

    Lutyens designed Greywalls - or High Walls as it was then called - for politician Alfred Lyttelton and his wife DD in 1901. As Jane Ridley (Lutyens's great-granddaughter) tells us in Edwin Lutyens: His Life, His Wife, His Work, "DD Lyttelton wanted a holiday house where her husband could both entertain and exercise his passion for golf; a house suited to golfers in wet tweeds and nailed boots at tea-time who transformed into dinner-party guests in white ties at 8.30. [...]

    She wanted a house with large windows; she also wanted something solid that looked as if it could withstand a siege. To which Ned replied, with sketches illustrating the point, 'Mrs. Lyttelton can't have large windows and a fortress too.'

    Mrs. Lyttelton did get large windows and a fortress too. Ned's solution was to surround the house with high, curved grey screen walls recalling the seventeenth-century fortifications by Vauban or perhaps the baroque fortifications at Berwick-on-Tweed. He made a formal entrance off the road which created an expectation of a grand axial approach, then deflected visitors sharp left up a diagonal drive, and gave the house an extraordinary curving front sliced between screen walls. Visitors couldn't enter the garden without going through the house. The garden, divided into courts with grey stone walls capped with Dutch grey pantiles, was really a series of rooms, and the climax of the design was not the house but the astonishing view over the dunes to the North Sea. Ned succeeded brilliantly in funnelling people through the house, but DD Lyttelton found the constant stream of visitors overwhelming and the lack of privacy unbearable. Exhausted by her six weeks' holiday she sold the house in 1906."

Comments

[Fran]

Sold within 5 years. Although I am sure it was exhausting always entertaining I feel sure plenty of staff were involved. Pretty impressive for just a holiday house, I think I might well have managed to stay longer!

[Cornflower]

Happily, since those early changes of hands it has been in the present owner's family for much longer, but yes, all that entertaining must have been exhausting.

[CLM]

My grandmother commissioned a house she could not afford to ensure her son, a novice architect, would get a better assignment than closets from his firm. She got what she asked for but the chief architect's obsession with flat roofs and resulting leaks made my grandfather hate the house (although my grandmother loved it, especially when it was on a magazine cover). Once the architect wanted to show the house to some potential clients when my grandparents were going out. They left the house unlocked for him. Because of an unexpected storm, the water was pouring in from the disputed leaks and he had to run around putting buckets underneath. We suspect those clients found another architect!