Fig Tree Court, Crooksbury
Recent Visits
Fig Tree Court, Surrey
Sunday, 26 June, 2022
By kind invitation of its owners, Trust members were invited to a guided tour of Fig Tree Court, a later addition and east wing to Crooksbury, Lutyens’s first country-house commission. This came in 1889 from Arthur Chapman, a family friend and chairman of the Farnham Liberals. Lutyens was 20 at the time and a pupil in Ernest George’s office. The commission enabled Lutyens to set up his own practice at 6 Gray’s Inn Square, London.
In 1898, Chapman asked Lutyens to do further work on it, which resulted in the addition of Fig Tree Court, a seven-bedroom, partially separate extension. This was originally constructed in a formal neo-Georgian style, which showed that Lutyens was beginning to experiment with Classicism, as did his design for the Farnham Liberal Club of 1894, also commissioned by Chapman. But this was later changed when a new owner in 1914 wanted a return to Lutyens’s vernacular style and the architect, rather than allow anyone else to interfere, rebuilt the wing in the traditional timber-and-tile Arts and Crafts style that survives today.
Crooksbury is one of Lutyens’s best known country houses and has been the subject of two major articles in Country Life. The original small house of 1890 represents his earliest work as an unknown architect. Fig Tree Court represents the architect’s work when his international reputation led to his commission to design India’s new administrative capital of India – New Delhi. Crooksbury was divided up in 1975.
Fig Tree Court contains the building’s most important rooms and features, in particular the magnificent drawing room with its original mahogany display cabinets, oak-panelled dining room and vaulted hallway. The latter, with its arches and domed ceiling, is like a miniature, compressed version of St Jude’s Church in Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed by Lutyens in 1909. “It’s like the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral,” says a previous owner. “If someone is speaking as they walk in front of you, it appears as if the sound is coming from behind you. The domes act as parabolic reflectors.” The formal walled garden – designed by Gertrude Jekyll – has deep herbaceous borders on either side, while stone-flagged steps lead down to a curved lawn with a perfectly circular pool 25ft in diameter, containing 100 koi carp. Lutyens first met Jekyll in May the same year that he started work on the house. Thus began the celebrated partnership between the young architect and garden designer until her death in 1932. Her influence can be seen throughout the garden, in the borders and their planting and use of shrubs and topiarised yew and bay trees as punctuation marks.
The Royal Hospital, Chelsea
The Royal Hospital, Chelsea
Friday, 8 July, 2022
In 1903, Lutyens wrote to Herbert Baker: “In architecture, Palladio is the game. It is so big – few appreciate it now and it requires considerable training to value and realise it. The way Wren handled it was marvellous. To the average man it is dry bones but under the mind of Wren it glows, and the stiff materials become as plastic clay… It is a game that never deceives, dodges, never disguises. It means hard thought all through – if laboured it fails. There is no fluke that helps it – the very, what one might call the machinery of it makes it impossible except in the hands of a Jones or a Wren. So, it is a big game, a high game, a game that Stevens played well as an artist should – tho’ he never touched Wren.”
In his biography of Lutyens, historian Christopher Hussey wrote, “In his lifetime he was widely held to be our greatest architect since Wren if not, as many maintained, his superior”.
By historical accident, all Wren’s large-scale secular commissions dated from after the 1680s. At the age of 50 his personal development, and that of English architecture, was ready for a monumental but humane architecture in which the scales of individual parts relate both to the whole and to the people who used them. The first large project Wren designed, the Chelsea Hospital (1682–1692), met its brief with distinction and such success that even in the 21st century it fulfils the building’s original function.
King Charles II founded the Royal Hospital as a retreat for veterans. The idea behind it – the provision of a hostel rather than the payment of pensions – was inspired by Les Invalides in Paris. The Royal Hospital opened its doors to the Chelsea Pensioners in 1692 for “the relief and succour” of veterans. Wren expanded his original design to add two additional quadrangles to the east and west of the central court; these were known respectively as the “Light Horse Court” and the “College Court”.
