Patrick Gwynne (1913 – 2003) can be considered one of the most important and remarkable Modern architects of the 20th century. Described by Neil Bingham in his essay The Houses of Patrick Gwynne (2000) as “an elegant gentleman, disciplined in his lifestyle, yet ever ready to find a witty solution to a design problem”, Gwynne has provided Britain with some of its best Modern buildings.

The house Gwynne designed for his parents, The Homewood www.nationaltrust.org.uk/thehomewood in Esher, Surrey (now owned by the National Trust), is perhaps his most celebrated achievement. Conceived in 1937, when Gwynne was only 24, this large and impressive house is one of the great accomplishments of Modern domestic architecture. It was described in The Times (in Gwynne’s 2003 obituary) as “a rare demonstration of how ‘heroic’ Modernism could be elegant, epicurean and English.”

Gwynne was born into a wealthy family in 1913 and showed an enthusiasm for architecture at a young age, joining the office of John Coleridge, a former assistant of Edwin Lutyens. His attention was soon diverted towards Europe, where the likes of Le Corbusier were pushing architecture in an entirely new direction. Excited by these new developments, Gwynne sought more suitable employment and ended up in the offices of Wells Coates, where he worked alongside Denys Lasdun. It was with the assistance of Coates and Lasdun that Gwynne created The Homewood.

The Second World War, during which Gwynne served in the RAF, forced a hiatus in Gwynne’s career, but afterwards he began his career as an independent architect in earnest. Working from The Homewood, where he lived from 1942 until the end of his life, he soon began to receive commissions for private houses from distinguished and wealthy clients. Although Gwynne did work on public projects (most notably two restaurants in Hyde Park), it is his private domestic work for which he is most admired. As was written in his obituary in The Times, “It is the residential work that revealed Gwynne’s extraordinary architectural genius, with his faultless sense of placing, innovative plan forms, novel techniques and materials, and meticulous concern for interior arrangement and detail.”

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Gwynne designed a number of houses in Hampstead and Blackheath in London, and in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Dorset, many of which have been Grade II listed. In the late 1960s, Gwynne’s quantity surveyor, Ken Monk, asked him to design a summer house in West Sussex on a strip of land overlooking the channel. This house was Vista Point, completed in 1970, and designed to take full advantage of the fantastic site.

Although there are a number of interesting houses nearby (most famously Sea Lane House, the only house in Britain designed by Marcel Breuer), Gwynne was little impressed by the neighbouring houses and designed Vista Point to entirely overlook the garden. As such the house has only few side windows. Bingham writes: “The house is planned with an hourglass shape, narrowing to a ‘waistline’ for the staircase core. The roof echoes the undulating walls, sliding from the front to the rear like a giant wave. Gwynne chose building materials, many of them man-made, to withstand the sea-front climate.”

Gwynne was well-known for his insistence on quality building materials and the care and attention he gave to structural design. As such his houses tend to stay in very good condition throughout, and Vista Point is a fine example of this.