Joldwynds is a modernist style house in

Holmbury St Mary Holmbury St Mary is a village in Surrey, England centered on shallow upper slopes of the Greensand Ridge. Its developed area is a clustered town southwest of Dorking and southeast of Guildford. Most of the village is in the borough of Guildfor ...

Surrey Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...

, England, designed by architect Oliver Hill for

Wilfred Greene, 1st Baron Greene Wilfrid Arthur Greene, 1st Baron Greene,First name spelt Wilfred in some sources (30 December 1883 – 16 April 1952) was a British lawyer and judge, noted for creating two crucial principles of administrative law, the Wednesbury doctrine an ...

. Completed in 1932,Powers (2005), pp. 138–139. it is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

. It replaced an 1874 Arts and Crafts style house designed by

Philip Webb Philip Speakman Webb (12 January 1831 – 17 April 1915) was a British architect and designer sometimes called the Father of Arts and Crafts Architecture. His use of vernacular architecture demonstrated his commitment to "the art of commo ...

, which itself replaced an earlier house of that name. Greene also had an additional house, The Wilderness, built in the grounds of Joldwynds, to a design by the modernist architectural partnership

Tecton The Tecton Group was a radical architectural group co-founded by Berthold Lubetkin, Francis Skinner, Denys Lasdun, Michael Dugdale, Anthony Chitty, Val Harding, Godfrey Samuel, and Lindsay Drake in 1932 and disbanded in 1939. The group was one ...

. This house, completed in 1939, is also Grade II listed.

Arts and Crafts style house

The original house called Joldwynds was acquired by surgeon and anatomist William Bowman,Dibble (2002), pp. 84–86. later Baronet of Holmbury St Mary, following the death in 1870 of its owner, Henry Champion Wetton. In the same year, Bowman commissioned Philip Webb to design a replacement house in Arts and Crafts style, which was completed in 1874. It was square, with three

gable A gable is the generally triangular portion of a wall between the edges of intersecting roof pitches. The shape of the gable and how it is detailed depends on the structural system used, which reflects climate, material availability, and aesth ...

s on each of the four sides, plus a wing extending diagonally from one corner, containing a laboratory and a billiards room. The centre of the house was occupied by a three-storey, octagonal living hall, surrounded by round arches at ground level and an

arcade Arcade most often refers to: * Arcade game, a coin-operated game machine ** Arcade cabinet, housing which holds an arcade game's hardware ** Arcade system board, a standardized printed circuit board * Amusement arcade, a place with arcade games * ...

on the next floor, and topped by a roof lantern. A stair

turret Turret may refer to: * Turret (architecture), a small tower that projects above the wall of a building * Gun turret, a mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon * Objective turret, an indexable holder of multiple lenses in an optical microscope * Mi ...

and a

barrel-vaulted A barrel vault, also known as a tunnel vault, wagon vault or wagonhead vault, is an architectural element formed by the extrusion of a single curve (or pair of curves, in the case of a pointed barrel vault) along a given distance. The curves are ...

library were added in 1893.Kirk (2005), pp. 114–117. The house became an influential example to other Arts and Crafts architects of the

Victorian era In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardia ...

.Stamp (2010), pp. 184–185. This house was demolished in 1930 by barrister Wilfred Greene, later Baron Greene of Holmbury St Mary in the County of Surrey. Only its outbuildings remain, a stable block and a pavilion. These are both Grade II listed buildings, designed by Webb.

Modernist style house

Greene commissioned Oliver Hill to design a new, modernist style house, completed in 1932. It was Hill's only modernist design before that of the

Midland Hotel, Morecambe The Midland Hotel is a Streamline Moderne building in Morecambe, Lancashire, England. It was built by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), in 1933, to the designs of architect Oliver Hill, with sculpture by Eric Gill, and murals by ...

, Lancashire, which was completed in 1933. The house has a T-shaped plan, with the stem of the T to the rear of the house. One wing is forward-curving, while the other wing and the stem of the T terminate in

loggia In architecture, a loggia ( , usually , ) is a covered exterior gallery or corridor, usually on an upper level, but sometimes on the ground level of a building. The outer wall is open to the elements, usually supported by a series of columns ...

s and

terrace Terrace may refer to: Landforms and construction * Fluvial terrace, a natural, flat surface that borders and lies above the floodplain of a stream or river * Terrace, a street suffix * Terrace, the portion of a lot between the public sidewalk an ...

s. At the centre of the front

elevation The elevation of a geographic location is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface (see Geodetic datum § Vert ...

there is a large, curved window around a stair-tower. The house is topped by a central drum, from which a succession of flat roofs step down. The curving front and central stair-tower window were ideas that recurred in Hill's design for the Midland Hotel. In the years immediately following its construction, the house required repairs to its rendering and to leaking roofs, leading Greene to sue Hill for compensation. The architect Margaret Lubetkin née Church was Greene's god daughter, and he consulted with Tecton, the modernist architectural practice led by her husband

Berthold Lubetkin Berthold Romanovich Lubetkin (14 December 1901 – 23 October 1990) was a Georgian-British architecture, architect who pioneered International style (architecture), modernist design in Britain in the 1930s. His work includes the Highpoint I, Hi ...

, intending to make alterations. Instead, he accepted Tecton's suggestion that another house could be built elsewhere in the grounds, for a similar cost.

The Wilderness

The new house was built against a south-facing slope in a part of the Joldwynds estate known as the

wilderness garden In the Western history of gardening, from the 16th to early 19th centuries, a wilderness was a highly artificial and formalized type of woodland, forming a section of a large garden. Though examples varied greatly, a typical English style was a ...

, and became known as The Wilderness. This time, Greene insisted on a

pitched roof Roof pitch is the steepness of a roof expressed as a ratio of inch(es) rise per horizontal foot (or their metric equivalent), or as the angle in degrees its surface deviates from the horizontal. A flat roof has a pitch of zero in either insta ...

. Anticipating the outbreak of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, he also required that the construction should be achievable by a local builder, using a collection of building materials that Greene stockpiled as a precaution against wartime shortages.Coe (1981), p. 177. The house was completed in 1939. Margaret Lubetkin was the principal designer. Unusually for Tecton, the design combined traditional with modernist elements. The house is largely of brick, with pitched slate roofs. In a more modern style, however, on the south, garden elevation there are concrete

pier image:Brighton Pier, Brighton, East Sussex, England-2Oct2011 (1).jpg, Seaside pleasure pier in Brighton, England. The first seaside piers were built in England in the early 19th century. A pier is a raised structure that rises above a body of ...

s supporting balconies and a canopy. It is an early example of this kind of stylistic mixture.

In media

Joldwynds was used as a location for the TV drama ''

Agatha Christie's Poirot ''Poirot'' (also known as ''Agatha Christie's Poirot'') is a British mystery drama television programme that aired on ITV from 8 January 1989 to 13 November 2013. David Suchet starred as the eponymous detective, Agatha Christie's fictional Her ...

'' in several episodes, including ''The Theft of the Royal Ruby'' and ''The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim''. Joldwynds was the location for the filming of the 2020 remake of Noël Coward's ''Blithe Spirit''.

Notes

References

* * * * * *{{cite book , last=Stamp , first=Gavin , year=2010 , title=Lost Victorian Britain: How the Twentieth Century Destroyed the Nineteenth Century's Architectural Masterpieces , location=London , publisher=Aurum Press , isbn=978-1-84513-532-4

External links

Images of Joldwynds
Arts and Crafts architecture in England Modernist architecture in England Grade II listed buildings in Surrey Grade II listed houses Houses in Surrey Houses completed in 1874 Houses completed in 1932 Houses completed in 1939 Philip Webb buildings Oliver Hill (architect) buildings Art Deco architecture in England