The Wilderness

The Wilderness is a private house built in 1938–9 for Sir Wilfrid Greene, Master of the Rolls. It was designed by the architectural practice Tecton under the leadership of Berthold Lubetkin and supervised by his wife, the architect Margaret Church, who was Greene's goddaughter. A conservatory added in 2008 is not of special interest.

Materials and Construction

The house is set into the side of a hill, supported on its outer face by concrete piers and by a terraced revetment. The shell is built of load-bearing 13-inch brick with reinforced concrete floor slabs. These slabs extend over the south elevation to form a first-floor balcony and a gutter fascia with a deep lip, which is carried through to form the gable wall verges. The balcony and gutter fascia are supported on reinforced concrete piers. The south-facing façade, which contains the door and window openings, is set back behind a projecting screen or mantle of columns, fascias, and parapets. Timber pitched roofs are clad in slate. Metal-framed windows survive on the upper floor of the south elevation; elsewhere they have been replaced with aluminium or uPVC.

Plan

The house consists of two parallel, pitched-roof, two-storey blocks laid out on the 'thick back wall' principle favoured by Tecton. In this arrangement, principal rooms in the front range are served by a shorter service range, all organised around a central axis. The southern block originally contained a living room, a study, a dining room, and a sun room on the ground floor, each with large south-facing windows or, in the case of the sun room, an open front. Above these, opening onto the balcony, were four bedrooms and three bathrooms. The rear block cuts into the rear of the front block and contains the hall and stairs, kitchens, and a back stairs leading to two former maids' rooms on the first floor. The sun room is now enclosed by a later 20th-century glazed screen wall set back from the building line (this element is not of special interest), and rear service rooms have been opened up.

Exterior

On the south elevation, the balcony and gutter fascia are visually supported on reinforced concrete piers that appear to pierce the balcony. The south-facing façade, containing the door and window openings, is therefore set back behind this projecting screen. The centrepiece—the study and the first-floor room above it—has a concave profile accentuated by a deep overhanging canopy. Small windows in the concave centrepiece are deep-set and, like windows at the rear and flank walls, have masonry cills and lintels. Above the entrance, the window unit is set within a horizontal panel. Either side of this bay, external first-floor walls are faced in shiplap wooden cladding. Concrete, which was originally board-marked but is now heavily painted, is visible on the soffit and faces of the upper balcony. This is an early example of its use.

The entrance, on the north elevation, is set back under a deep concrete canopy supported on concrete piers and flanked by glazed panels. Metal-framed window units survive on the upper floor of the south elevation, giving access to the balcony, but elsewhere they have been replaced with aluminium or uPVC. Doors are replaced. The former open sun room on the south-facing elevation has inserted doors set back from the wall line. Replaced metal-framed external stairs on the eastern gable descend from a projecting concrete balcony or landing.

Interior

The concrete slab is exposed over the stairs, which rise from the rear hall. The stairs are of masonry with integral moulded steps and skirtings and a grey polished stone coping to the balustrade. The entrance leads to a small lobby divided from the hall by a timber screen with a central doorway featuring a deep rectangular architrave. The living room has a brick and tile fireplace in a plain flush surround, in a traditional rather than Modernist manner, which projects forward into the room on a deep chimney breast. The curved screen at the back of the dining room, shown on the original plans, was removed some years ago, creating a single rectangular space; the former sun room is now internal. Access to the conservatory, which was added to the south-west gable in 2008, breaks through the gable wall.

On the first floor, bedrooms give onto a shallow balcony. In the ground-floor principal rooms and rear of the hall, and on the first-floor corridor, floors are of cork with shallow integral moulded cork skirtings. Doors are flush-panelled, some with original door furniture.

History

The Wilderness was designed and built in 1938–9 by the eminent 20th-century architectural practice Tecton, under the supervision of Margaret Church. It stands in the grounds of Joldwynds, which had been built in 1933 by Oliver Hill. Joldwynds was owned by Sir Wilfrid Greene, Master of the Rolls, who had commissioned Hill to replace a large vernacular revival house, also known as Joldwynds, built in 1873 by Philip Webb. However, Greene found Hill's house cumbersome and expensive to maintain, particularly the flat roof, which leaked.

Greene turned to Berthold Lubetkin, whose wife Margaret Church, also an architect, was his goddaughter. Rather than repair Joldwynds, it was decided to build afresh on the wilderness garden, where Greene insisted on a traditional design with a pitched roof. With war imminent, all the materials were purchased before the project began. The construction was intended to be straightforward, suitable for a small local contractor.

Tecton, under the leadership of Berthold Lubetkin, was one of the most advanced architectural practices of the inter-war period, known for their far-reaching Modernist, functionalist approach to design, which reflected current trends in Europe. Their first work was for London Zoo, with the Gorilla House of 1932, followed in 1934 by the Penguin Pool (both Grade I). Finsbury Health Centre, designed 1935–6 and opened in 1938 (also Grade I), echoed architecturally new concepts in combining health provision under one roof. The practice built relatively few private houses. Pre-war examples of individual houses and housing included Six Pillars, Dulwich, built in 1934–5 (Grade II), Bungalows A and B at Whipsnade, of 1933–6 (Bungalow A listed at Grade II*), and most notably Highpoint I and II, of 1933–5 and 1938, both Grade I. Only a few other houses, for example Beach House at Aldwick Bay, West Sussex (1933–4), which is now very altered, and the Whipsnade bungalows, were designed by Lubetkin, while the gatekeeper's lodge at Himley Hall, Dudley, is the only other house by Margaret Church. The practice disbanded following the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Wilderness stands outside the norm for Tecton's work but is seen as a watershed between pre-war and post-war design in attempting to reconcile, both stylistically and structurally, the Modernist and the traditionalist, to create a native British modern house, anticipating post-war house design. Lubetkin was not alone in this; on the Continent, Rietveld was exploring similar paths in re-appraising the form and function of the modern house. Although the Wilderness suffers structurally and to some degree aesthetically from the constraints imposed by the brief, it carries considerable importance for its position in the evolution of the inter-war house, designed by a practice of international repute.

The Wilderness continues a tradition in Holmbury St Mary of an unusually rich range of bespoke houses by architects including George Edmund Street, Norman Shaw, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Charles Francis Annesley Voysey, and Sir Alfred Waterhouse.

Aside from his career at the bar, Greene was Chairman of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts and President of the British Records Association in 1937, while from 1941–5 he was chairman of the National Buildings Record.