SIR EDWIN LUTYENSpiece of English baroque garden furniture
still sells well. According to James Lees-
Milne, who knew Lutyens during his time
as Chief Executive of the National Trust’s
Country House Scheme, the architect was
in person “leonine, breezy, untidy,
flamboyant and inspired.”
Portraits of him in photos and in oils
do little justice to the visionary who would
define the Edwardian and Georgian country
house. They suggest a balding bureaucrat
with a trim moustache, thick-rimmed
spectacles and pipe – a 1930s bank manager
perhaps. But then Sir Edward Elgar – born
12 years before Lutyens and Britain’s
greatest romantic composer – grew a great
bristling military moustache and loved
being mistaken for a colonel of cavalry. ³
We have to look beyond the fashion of the
era to appreciate the genius, just as we have
to hope that 100 years from now future
generations will ignore our stylish anomalies.
Edwin “Ned” Lutyens was the tenth of
13 children. He was born in Kensington,
London in 1869 to Captain Charles Lutyens
and his dutiful Irish wife. It was apt that he
was named after a friend of his artist father,
the painter and sculptor Edwin Henry
Landseer, who two years earlier had created
the four giant lions for Trafalgar Square at
the other end of Whitehall.
Lutyens studied architecture at South
Kensington School of Art, and in 1888
began his own practice aged only 19.
He was fortunate in his first commission
for a private house near Farnham in Surrey,because this brought him into contact with
the formidable garden designer Gertrude
Jekyll. In 1896 they began working together
on another house at Munstead Wood near
Godalming, Surrey. It was the beginning
of an informal professional partnership
that would define the look of many of
his country houses.
The garden was never an afterthought
with Lutyens. He seemed to understand
that wealthy English patrons loved their
pets first and their gardens second, with
children finishing a poor third. In 1912
while designing the Viceroy’s House in New
Delhi, India, he stipulated it be specifically
planted so on one or two days a year, its
colour would be entirely supplied by
butterflies drawn to the gardens’ flowers.