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."
