The Arts and Crafts style house, in which Jekyll lived from 1897 to 1932, was designed by architect Edwin Lutyens to complement the garden.

[2] The entire original area of Jekyll's property is grade I listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

[3] The main house, which retains the name of Munstead Wood and whose plot contains most of the original gardens, is a Grade I listed building.

[4] The properties in the other plots, which are to the north and west of the main house, also include listed buildings designed by Lutyens, in the lesser two categories; these were mostly Jekyll's outbuildings.

[17] Jekyll's long relationship with Country Life began when proprietor Edward Hudson first visited Munstead Wood in 1899.

[3] While the house was still being built, Lutyens obtained another, larger commission in Surrey, Orchards, as a result of his future clients being impressed with Munstead Wood when they happened to walk past the construction site.

On the house's south, garden elevation, the tiled roof extends down to the top of the ground floor, broken by two large gables.

[25] Other features included a large hooded fireplace,[1] and a shallow-stepped staircase leading up to a long oak-beamed gallery,[27] overhanging the central courtyard.

[28] A garden seat built by Lutyens for Jekyll at Munstead Wood, consisting of a large block of elm set on stone, was 'christened' the Cenotaph of Sigismunda by their friend Charles Liddell.

[32] Jekyll later wrote: The name was so undoubtedly suitable to the monumental mass of Elm, and to its somewhat funereal environment of weeping Birch and spire-like Mullein, that it took hold at once, and the Cenotaph of Sigismunda it will always be as long as I am alive to sit on it.

[29] In 1919 the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, asked Lutyens to design a catafalque to serve as a temporary memorial structure in Whitehall, London.