Any Offers for Lut’s Houses
By Michael Hanson
Since my note, “A Glut of Lut Houses”, in the Winter Newsletter, little has changed. Not one of the houses on the market at that time has sold, though at least two are said to be “under offer” by estate agents whose optimism is, as ever, boundless. However, three more houses have come onto the market, one of which is in the top drawer of Lutyens houses.
Berrydown Court (sometimes wrongly called Berrydowne), near Overton, Hampshire, is the least-known of the dozen Grade I listed houses designed ab initio by Lutyens, as distinct from being altered or extended by him. Built in 1897-98 for Archibald Grove, Liberal MP and founder-editor of the New Review, its formal gardens were planted by Gertrude Jekyll, but were not a success, because they would not grow rhododendrons and azaleas as Grove wanted. After the house was finished, William Robinson was called in to advise on the gardens in 1899, but even he could not find the right answer, for in 1900 Lady Emily wrote to Lutyens that the “19th solution” was being tried.
That solution also failed, and Grove sold the house and moved to Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, where he commissioned Lutyens in 1903 to design a new house, for which Gertrude Jekyll was commissioned to design the garden in 1906. Grove lived at Pollards Park House until his death in 1920, and the house and its gatehouse are listed Grade II as being by Lutyens, but the second edition of Pevsner’s Buckinghamshire, revised by Elizabeth Williamson in 1994, attributes the house to James Edwin Forbes (of Forbes & Tate), who lived in the house next door, The Sheiling, and also designed Pollardswood Grange and possibly also Pollardswood. There is a mystery here that deserves further research, not least because Francis Jekyll’s master list of his aunt’s garden plans also has an entry in 1908 for Pollard’s Wood, designed by J E Forbes for himself, but said to be at Fernhurst, which is in Sussex.
Berrydown Court was bought by Sir Edward Cooper, Lord Mayor of London in 1919-20, who died in 1922. The problems with its gardens are not sufficient to explain why this long, low Tudor-style house with its interlinked pair of great gables on the garden elevation (much more dramatic than those on the SW front of Homewood) was dismissed as “undistinguished” and “reminiscent of a Caldecott Farm” by Lutyens’s biographer, Christopher Hussey. It was completely ignored by Sir Lawrence Weaver in all editions of his books on Lutyens houses and gardens, and also by Hussey and Butler in the memorial volumes. Pevsner was not allowed to see the garden side when he called in the mid-1960s, so he never fully understood the house, though he was impressed by the high garden walls.
The late Roderick Gradidge was the first to appreciate the house, calling it “experimental” and “eccentric” in his Dream Houses in 1980, and in the catalogue notes he wrote on it when it was included in the Arts Council exhibition on Lutyens in 1981-82. In that same catalogue, Colin Amery wrote that Berrydown “is an architectural success only because of the long tile-capped walls that extend from the house to form the splendid double courtyard approach.”
By then, the house had shed its anonymity, having been placed on the market for sale in 1977 by the executors of the late Mrs Miriam Sacher. It was at this time that the house was listed Grade I, together with its entrance lodge and all the walls to the roadside boundary, the forecourt and the kitchen garden (in the corner of which is a little gem of a garden store, tile-hung, with a complex gabled and hipped roof, also listed Grade I). The official listing description makes a particular point of mentioning the “two massive gables (meeting in a high valley)” on the south front, which Pevsner never saw, and notes that “the original interior is virtually unaltered.”
Such was the demand for this five-bedroom house with 585 acres of land when it was marketed with a guide price of £550,000 that it went to best offers and was eventually sold for well over £600,000 to a Dane, Jurgen Tholstrup, uncle of the society restauranteur Mogens Throlstrup. Over the past 24 years, the estate has been added to, and it now extends to 1,893 acres. It has now been placed on the market for sale in nine lots, but with a guide price of more than £10 million for the whole. Unfortunately, prospective purchasers have not been able to view it yet because of foot-and-mouth restrictions.
Also new to the market is High Hascombe, near Godalming, Surrey, designed in 1896 for Charles Cook, a barrister and Assistant Charity Commissioner for England and Wales, who called Lutyens back in 1903 to add a neo-Georgian music room (now the drawing room). Originally known as Sullingstead, this Grade II listed house has gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll – but not until 1924, by which time Cook, who was Chief Charity Commissioner from 1906 to 1916, had been knighted since 1914. He died in 1934. Sold in 1967 for £45,000 and again in 1983 for £450,000, the house was last sold with 20 acres of land in 1998, when offers over £3.5 million were being invited. It has been back on the market privately since before Christmas, and is about to come on the open market at a price that may be over £4.5 million.
Finally, a Lutyens property that is the most affordable of all those now on the market. The Hoo, which stands opposite St Mary’s Church at Willingdon, near Eastbourne, East Sussex, was designed in 1902 for Alexander Wedderburn, KC, who was Recorder of Gravesend from 1897 to 1921, and who died at The Hoo in 1931. The house is one of the dozen Grade I listed masterpieces mentioned earlier, and Lutyens also designed the beautiful formal gardens, with their characteristic circular steps, a domed water-lily pool and two handsome gazebos (which, together with the flint garden walls, are listed Grade II*), though Miss Jekyll may have provided planting plans (of which there is no record, however). Jane Brown puts these gardens among “the hallowed two dozen” by Lutyens and Jekyll, and says they are “a model of fine conservation.”
This is praise indeed, given that The Hoo was converted into 11 separate homes in 1955 (when the lower lawn was sold off for housing), and the owners contribute to the upkeep of the communal gardens through a quarterly management charge. One of the 11 units is a two-bedroom house forming part of the East Wing and containing the original library. This is now an entrance hall, with triple-doors to a beautiful living room, which has three tall windows overlooking the terrace and gardens to the South Downs. Upstairs are two bedrooms and a bathroom, and a fully boarded loft. In addition to the communal gardens, this house has its own large patio, with York stone paving and an area of lawn and rose beds, and its own brick-built garden store. There is also a garage. This desirable property has been the second home of the present vendor since 1975, who is reluctantly selling it for £164,950 on a 999-year lease with a share of the freehold.
Inexplicably, the local agents, Taylor Engley, attribute the design of The Hoo to “Sir Edward Lutyens” and wrongly name his client Lord Willingdon, who lived at Ratton, the 15th-century manor house at Willingdon, whose timber-framed gatehouse is now all that survives. Lutyens knew Lord Willingdon well, describing him as “full of charm, ready wit and understanding,” but he thought Lady Willingdon was “very brusque and in her way rude.” Willingdon became Viceroy of India 1931-36 (for which he was created a marquess), and as his Vicereine the redoubtable Marchioness of Willingdon “combined bad manners with worse taste,” colouring every surface of the Viceroy’s Palace mauve, as Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley pointed out in The Letters of Edwin Lutyens. Fortunately, the next Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, had a good sense to call in Lutyens in 1938 to restore the Viceroy’s Palace and its gardens (where she had cut down 80 blue gum trees and taken all the elephants off the gate piers) to its pre-Willingdon state. It was his last visit to India.
