Great Houses Process.

Edwin Lutyens was one of England's most prominent designers. When he designs his houses he keeps them symmetrical and adds mass forces to keep people promenading throughout the space. When begin to design the boards, I began with thinking that the two most important things on the board were the floor plans. However, as I kept moving things I realized that movement and was the most important. This led to my final board layout where I made the floor plan the most important and laid images around it to make it symmetrical. These are some facts about Homewood.

Project Statement:

One of England’s most prominent and inventive architects, Edwin Lutyens, deploys axial complexity into traditional buildings, playing the idea of a symmetrical building against asymmetrical movement throughout the scheme. At Homewood, Lutyens uses masses – staircases, chimneys and walls – to separate and define circulation patterns, resulting in intricate experiences within harmonious interiors.

Site Plan

The seven acre (three hectare) site features a garden, also designed by Lutyens, linking house to land through sophisticated interior/exterior relationships and development of exterior “rooms” in the garden.

Materials and furnishings

In the Arts and Crafts movement, material expression remained a major approach to design. Consistent with this philosophy, at Homewood, Edwin specified white-washed plaster, wood and brick, allowing the simplicity of the materials to shine through and enhance the space through contrast. Of color, Lutyens suggested that: “Black is conductive to magnificence. It gives life to white molding.”

Lighting

With natural light as his main light source, Lutyens took advantage of this source in all rooms but the drawing room.

Spatial Adjacencies

Typical for Lutyens’ houses, the plan takes the form of an H or a square. Users accessed minor and servant spaces with corridors, wherein public rooms, the designer fashioned a promenade for users to move through. At Homewood, Lutyens distorted the square plan to accommodate a larder and scullery, both related to kitchen uses.

Did you know?

Homewood, also known as the Dower House, served as the residence for Dowager Lady Lytton who later became Lutyen’s mother-in-law. With an Arts and Crafts aesthetic, Lutyens purposely made this place “simple and vernacular,”. belying its complexity when looking at it closely, revealing a complex and clever design “incorporating mannerist detail.”

“In essence, it’s one of those pretty little gable houses, with weather-tiled upper floors, to which the young aspire and the elderly withdraw”.[