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Upper Lawn is a weekend retreat in Wiltshire built by the late architects Alison and Peter Smithson for themselves and their family and used by them from 1959 to 1982. It’s a place of obvious delight, thanks to a garden enclosed by old stone walls in which it stands, a clump of grand old beech trees just outside, and broad views of sweeping countryside beyond. The house itself is a well-proportioned, thoughtfully detailed, somewhat rustic glass box that makes good use of the transparency and openness that modernist building methods made possible. It’s also a work of less obvious riches, a material diary of building and dwelling, a three-dimensional essay on the passage of time. Now it is being put up for sale by its owners for the past 23 years, the graphic designer Ian Cartlidge and his wife, Jo.
The Smithsons, acknowledged founders of brutalism, never saw themselves as practising a style, but applying an attitude – one that makes evident the ways buildings are made. Upper Lawn is possibly the purest expression of their ideals. Having to satisfy no clients but themselves, it was a “device”, as Peter (1923-2003) called it, “for trying things out on oneself” and for generating ideas they could use on larger projects, such as their headquarters for the Economist in St James’s, London.
The story of their house began in 1945, when the 17-year-old Alison (1928-1993) went looking for the remains of Fonthill Abbey, the fabled and colossal folly built from 1796 to 1813 by William Thomas Beckford with his father’s vast and ill-gotten, slave-based wealth. As if in a “fairy story”, as she later put it, Alison hacked through a thorn hedge to discover substantial fragments of gothic architecture that, according to history books of the time, did not exist.
Years later, she and Peter bought a derelict cottage, condemned to demolition, on the abbey’s landscaped estate. The Smithsons set about designing a place that was, as their daughter Soraya Smithson now says, “about everyone going away and spending time as a family. If both parents are working that’s a very important thing.” Their project would also “test new products”, try out “certain applications and assemblies” and find out what it would be like to live year-round in a house glass-walled on every side except the north – a “Solar Pavilion”, to use one of several names they gave the house – with solid masonry inside that it was hoped would store the heat. It was, says Soraya, “cold in winter and blazingly hot in summer, but it was not unpleasant and we didn’t think anything of it”.
The project was romantic and technical at once, bringing together the ghost of the abbey and the pages of a building products catalogue, the stone ruins of the old cottage with pitch fibre drainpipes and high-purity aluminium sheet. The old gable wall was re-used as an internal structure that divided the new house into two parts, and off which its light timber frame was supported. The walled garden was retained, its paving repaired and selectively rearranged. Two windows from the cottage survive in the perimeter wall, one looking into the new house, the other into what is now an external room.
The Smithsons’ architecture was about not just the house but everything around it – planting, paving, atmospherics, landscape – and they wanted to honour what they found. When a self-seeded hawthorn proved too thick to be easily sawn, they pruned it into a peacock-like piece of topiary they called the “wall bird”. Architecture at Upper Lawn merges with gardening – a matter of choosing and nurturing as much as making new. The glass box of the house itself, the flimsiest and plainest part of the ensemble, is an instrument for experiencing everything else: its lower level acts as an extension of the introverted garden, its upper as a light-filled deck for enjoying the expansive surrounding panorama, looking back to the space in the sky where the abbey’s 300ft tower once stood. Two opposite spatial experiences can be had within the one modest structure.
The design animates different kinds of time – historical, human, seasonal, biological, constructional. The juxtaposition of stone and aluminium marks the passage of centuries. Weathering has brought together the once-contrasting metal panels and timber frames, dulling the shine of one and silvering the other. The Smithsons made a written, drawn and photographic record of their 20-plus years in the house, some of it eventually published as a book, which describes its different characters in snow and sunshine, their children’s improvisations with landscape features and building materials. Another book, AS in DS, chronicles their trips from London to the house in their Citroën DS 19.
In the county of Stonehenge and Avebury, Upper Lawn works its own quiet magic, making relationships between building and land. It’s a place of simple pleasures of material and nature and unexpected inversions, the house sometimes looking less substantial than the old plants climbing the walls, and with crossovers of inside and out. It has the power to make the things around it into enhanced versions of themselves: the big old trees, for example, look especially big and old. It’s a rare example of architecture that gets you looking at things other than itself, which is one reason why the Cartlidges have welcomed hundreds of students over the years to come and see how it’s done.
All of this is achieved with austerity. While the Smithsons’ “folly”, as they called it, shares with Beckford’s a desire to escape, it is the opposite of his extravagance, its total mass and volume a tiny fraction of the abbey’s. It was (as they also said) a “camping box”, an exercise in living with very little. It consists of two upstairs rooms and one downstairs, a shower/WC, and a small kitchen counter with, in the Smithsons’ days, only a camping stove for cooking. Thanks to the madness of property values, the asking price of this shelter for the simple life, now Grade II-listed, will be about £800,000. You won’t, though, find anything else like Upper Lawn, for this or any sum.
