Munstead Wooden, the celebrated Arts and Crafts property and backyard in Surrey, has been obtained by the National Rely on, the charity for the preservation of historic houses, gardens and landscape, with economical assist from the British governing administration, “for the satisfaction of all”.
The household and back garden, an built-in Gesamtkunstwerk of planet significance where residence and back garden are subtly but inextricably linked, was made by the architect Edwin Lutyens for, and with, his consumer and mentor Gertrude Jekyll. It experienced been for sale, at an asking value of £5.25m pursuing the death in March 2022 of its owner Marjorie Clark. Clark, and her partner Robert Clark—a major banker in the Town of London who himself died in 2013—renovated the residence and backyard more than 50 % a century just after buying the put in the mid-1960s. They had for lots of several years made the backyard garden readily available to groups of visitors. It was, Robert Clark once mentioned, “the most effective investment decision I at any time produced”.
The National Rely on reported it had obtained the dwelling as a result of a personal sale and that it “has started fundraising to aid the restoration and reimagination of the garden and house”. The have confidence in mentioned it “is doing work with the regional neighborhood and associates to create strategies on the best way to open up the property to readers in upcoming”.
The exclusive top quality of Munstead Wood lies in the tight and graduated integration amongst the wooden, woodland backyard, herbaceous borders, paving and—all at the same level—the ground floor of the residence which is crafted in regional elements, Surrey brick and Bargate stone, and put in its woodland placing as if to be found by likelihood instead than structure. The feeling of discovery carries on into the floor program of the house, entire of unanticipated turns and vistas. Almost everything is a gradual reveal, and the aesthetic each within and out is heightened by Lutyens’s early artistic mastery of the fall of gentle throughout masonry, clean carving and deep established windows.
Guides by Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood. Her do the job as author, journalist, seed service provider, florist, and backyard garden designer assisted fund the repairs of residence and yard Megan Taylor / Nationwide Rely on Images
The residence was accomplished in 1896 to layouts by the 27-calendar year-aged Lutyens for his mentor Jekyll, a formidable, writer, artist, historian of crafts and state lifetime horticulturist, and backyard designer. In 1886 she had acquired its web page, 13 acres of unpromising Surrey heathland, and planted a wood in which she developed her personal form of informal gardening, and placed a collection of practical buildings for writing—she was a serial contributor to Region Lifestyle journal and a producer of publications on gardening, craftwork and buildings—and the marketing of seeds and flowers. Munstead Wood was constantly a doing work location for Jekyll, funded moreover by her guides and journalism.
In 1889 she fulfilled Lutyens, currently a prodigious expertise, all of 19, with a retentive memory for the architectural detail of regional creating in Surrey, where he had expended childhood summers. It was a meeting that manufactured him as an architect. The austere, nearly monastic, Jekyll aesthetic and sense of “rightness” fed into his operate as a builder of romantic, vernacular structures, but also, in afterwards yrs as a learn of classicism accountable for masterpieces such as the starkly castellated Castle Drogo, in Devon, the terrific war graves distribute across the killing fields of Flanders and Normandy, the imperial money at New Delhi and his good unfinished design and style for the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. Lutyens in convert offered Jekyll a complete new avenue of function as a garden designer to a modern clientele (get the job done that served fork out for the upkeep of house and garden), ordinarily in league with Lutyens in the state household practice that he constructed in the late 1890s and 1900s on the back of their collaboration at Munstead Wooden.
William Nicholson’s 1920 portrait of Gertrude Jekyll in the selection of the National Portrait Gallery, London Ian Dagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photograph
Jekyll herself was a vital figure in the heritage of the Arts and Crafts movement. A talented amateur artist, she experienced attended lectures by both John Ruskin—the mental founder of the movement—and William Morris, the learn of implementing the movement’s principles in decoration and inside design. When she once recommended to Ruskin that she might make a residence in Surrey adorned with marble, he insisted that she looked in its place at whitewash and tapestry as her aesthetic. It was a daily life-changing instant that later on motivated the aesthetic of Munstead Wooden alone but also a collection of masterpieces on which Lutyens and Jekyll collaborated which includes the restoration of Lindisfarne Castle (1906) and Lambay Castle, Co Dublin (1908-10) and a new residence, Deanery Back garden, for Edward Hudson, proprietor of Nation Daily life journal, a very important figure in marketing the function of Lutyens and Jekyll.
The refined perception of geometry, and participate in with the segments of a circle, that Lutyens formulated at Munstead Wooden, in both of those the setting up and the elevation of archways and lintels, fed as a result of into 50 years of subsequent perform. The arc of a circle is basic to his most advanced, practically abstracted layouts: the Cenotaph in Whitehall—whose seemingly straight elevations meet up with in the junction of their arched sides miles over ground—and the stepped arches of the war memorial at Thiepval and, on an even more massive scale, in the great unbuilt aisles of Liverpool Cathedral.
A further pointed out Lutyens do the job in Surrey, Goddards, is maintained by the Landmark Belief, the charity that restores scaled-down historic buildings and allows them to its users as holiday lodging, and is the house of the Lutyens Have faith in, the charity committed to analysis and education and learning on the architect’s work.
Munstead Wood and its owner had near ties to artists of the day. Jekyll experienced photographed local homes with her close friend Helen Allingham, who remaining distinctive watercolours of Munstead Wood, which include the renowned summer herbaceous border, 200 toes long and 14 toes deep. William Nicholson remaining two indelible portraits of Jekyll: a potent portrait in the selection of the Nationwide Portrait Gallery—left to the gallery in 1947 at the convey wish of Lutyens, who had died in 1944—and a pleasant portrait of her gardening boots painted, in accordance to legend, due to the fact Nicholson experienced issues in obtaining the at any time entrepreneurial and innovative Jekyll to sit even now adequate for him to capture her likeness.
When Robert and Marjorie Clark acquired Munstead Wooden in the 1960s, 30 decades after Jekyll’s loss of life, many of its borders and rockeries experienced been grassed about as an overall economy. Many of the wood’s finest trees ended up wrecked in the excellent storm of October 1987, right after which the Clarks’ head gardener suggested getting rid of the grassed more than parts and restoring Jekyll’s whole style, both equally shut to the house and by into the bordering wood. This venture was triumphantly attained by Annabel Watts, the foremost expert on the historical past of the house and backyard, who has been head gardener at Munstead Wood for 19 several years.
