Paul Mellon Centre | Making and Remaking the Edwardian House

Many of the well-known new Edwardian mansions were actually remodellings of older houses or incorporated within them fragments of other buildings that had been recently demolished. During his research for The Edwardians and their Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin identified a series of key houses which illustrated how the attitude of their architects and owners towards historic structures was quite different from the one prevalent today.

Concentrating on three key buildings – Lord Avebury’s Kingsgate Castle in Kent, Earl Carrington’s Daws Hill at Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire and W.D. Caröe’s family home at Vann in Surrey – this talk identifies new research areas that emerged from the research for the book. All three houses incorporate details or older elements of other ones, in the case of Kingsgate and Daws Hill pieces that had come from other homes in family ownership. The subtitle of the book is The New Life of Old England, drawing on the fact that there was an element of renewal in these buildings that also influenced the appearance of new houses designed at the same time.

Adaptive reuse has become a priority for architects working today and the research behind The Edwardians and their Houses has uncovered some of the historical and intellectual origins behind it.