Patrick Gwynne

(Alban) Patrick Gwynne (1913 – 2003) was a British modernist architect with Welsh roots, best known for designing and building The Homewood, which he left to the National Trust in 2003.

[2] His father planned for him to be an accountant but since Gwynne wanted to be an architect, secured articles (indentured training) for him with Ernest Coleridge, a former assistant to Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Gwynne immediately re-designed a Victorian house in Notting Hill Gate to include a private theatre and foyer in an advanced modernist manner.

This was the European-influenced dwelling named "The Homewood", built in 1938 on another part of an 8-acre (3.2 ha) estate, to replace the rambling Victorian house in Esher, Surrey.

These houses mark the height of 1960s life style, many designed as a series of connecting rooms that could be thrown together for parties, and with built-in dressers and drinks cabinets.

Building The Homewood when he was just 24, Gwynne acknowledged his sources as Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat House.

His parents had "one good year" in the house, but died early in the Second World War, while Gwynne was serving in the Royal Air Force constructing airfields.

His long-term companion, pianist Harry Rand, had an adjoining bedroom, identical to Gwynne's, with a single bed and washbasin concealed behind sliding panels.

[4] 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.

It was designed for a chemical engineer and his family and had a floor plan of 1900 square feet,[7] in a tri-form configuration consisting of a central area with three uniform arms.

It incorporated several features seen in The Homewood including movable room dividers, floor to ceiling glazing and strategically placed narrow windows.

It was demolished in 1990, but his smaller Dell Restaurant, built 1965, at the other end of the park survives, and the terrazzo terrace and built-in seating overlooking the Serpentine show his signature touches.

[6] His obituary in The Times notes his genius for his residential work "with his faultless sense of placing, innovative plan forms, novel techniques and materials, and meticulous concern for interior arrangement and detail."

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/36) with Patrick Gwynne in 1997-99 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.