LUTYENS’ HERITAGE
Designer Sir Edwin Lutyens attributes his career to childhood illness; unable to play, he learned to draw
There is a new design label on the virtual high street. It specialises in furniture and lighting with a distinctive, geometric edge. Anyone familiar with the work of the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens will notice a resemblance as they scroll through the array of sharply angled acrylic tables, multi-armed pendant lights and wooden chairs with their mathematically precise, carved- out backs.
The aesthetic echoes are no coincidence of course. This is Lutyens Contemporary – a brand launched last year by the architect’s granddaughter Candia Lutyens in order, she explains, ‘to bring the Lutyens design idiom into the 21st century.’
This may be a recent project, but Candia has been recreating her grandfather’s furniture and lighting designs through her bespoke brand, Lutyens Furniture and Lighting, for the last 30 years. The initial idea to relaunch his work came about after she and her husband commissioned a pair of reproduction ‘ Napoleon’ armchairs for their own home.
Any talent I may have was due to a long illness as a boy. Because I was not allowed to play games, I had to teach myself, for my enjoyment, to use my eyes instead of my feet
Edwin originally designed this asymmetric chair in 1913 for his own use, and then went on to make one for each of his five children. Having grown up with her father’s, Candia couldn’t imagine living in a house without one. ‘Having these chairs produced made us realise that Lutyens’ design work deserved to be better known,’ she explains. ‘ He is probably still the most important British architect of the 20th century, but he was also a hugely creative and productive designer of furniture and lighting.’
Strength from weakness
Born the 10th of 13 children in 1869 and raised in Surrey, Edwin Landseer Lutyens contracted rheumatic fever as a young child, an experience that had a profound e ect on his future career. ‘Any talent I may have was due to a long illness as a boy,’ he is reputed to have told the writer, Sir Osbert Sitwell. ‘Because I was not allowed to play games, [ I] had to teach myself, for my enjoyment, to use my eyes instead of my feet’.
‘He was drawing buildings from an early age,’ says Paul Atterbury, design historian and Lutyens enthusiast. ‘ In those days, people learned architecture by looking at buildings, and he spent a large part of his childhood looking at vernacular architecture before serving as an apprentice in an architect’s practice.’
Lutyens spent his early career designing relatively small Arts and Crafts- style country
houses such as Tigbourne Court in Surrey and, Candia’s personal favourite, Bois des Moutiers near Dieppe. ‘ I love it because it’s an almost transitional building between his early Arts and Crafts and later classical work,’ she explains.
That classicism is best captured in the designs he produced in the early 1920s when he was lead architect for India’s imperial capital, New Delhi, and in the many war graves and memorials he designed, including the Cenotaph in London. Much admired at the time, these buildings still look relevant today. ‘Lutyens’ buildings are really well thought through,’ says Atterbury. ‘He was fanatical about detail, craftsmanship and, while he was very adventurous in his use of structure, all of his designs are about mathematics and go back to Greek ideas of harmony and balance.’
The same is true of his furniture and lighting which, like many architects, he designed for specific buildings, including the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi and the neoclassical manor house Gledstone Hall in Yorkshire. ‘His aesthetic was quite sparse – he absolutely loathed chintz,’ Candia says. ‘For him, decoration was more in the form than the colour or fabric, and what mattered above all was the geometric precision of each piece.’
It is this aesthetic that Candia has brought to her new line. Some of the pieces here, such as the ‘ Napoleon’ chair and ‘Cardinal Hat’ pendant light are original Lutyens designs. Candia has reinterpreted them with contemporary materials (the ‘Cardinal Hat’, originally made for Oxford’s Campion Hall Chapel, now boasts an acrylic shade), but many are completely unique. ‘My favourite piece in the new collection is the ‘Armed’ pendant,’ says Candia. ‘ It’s not faithful to Lutyens, but I think he would see a continuation. It has the same fluidity, movement and geometric shapes.’
And that is the point. The bespoke line was launched to preserve his legacy; with Lutyens Contemporary, Candia aims to broaden his appeal and bring his aesthetic to a new, younger audience. And would the architect, who died on New Year’s Day in 1944, approve of his granddaughter’s fondness for acrylic? Paul Atterbury thinks so. ‘He was a man who loved materials,’ he says. ‘ So I think he would really enjoy the challenge of acrylic.’ * 0845 838 6374; lutyens- contemporary.com