Patrick Gwynne

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.

Gwynne was born in Portchester, Hampshire in 1913 to naval Commander Alban Gwynne and mother, Ruby. They also had a daughter, "Babs".

He attended Harrow School where he first connected with modernist architecture on a school sketching excursion near Amersham in Buckinghamshire, where he saw Amyas Connell's "High and Over", the first modern movement house in Britain.

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. On completion, Gwynne met Wells Coates, founder of the Modern Architecture Research Group. Gwynne immediately re-designed a Victorian house in Notting Hill Gate to include a private theatre and foyer in an advanced modernist manner. The theatre still exists as part of the Estonian House. Gwynne then worked for Coates while designing a new house for his parents. This was the European-influenced dwelling he 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. The family used profits from the sale of their Welsh estate – a early nineteenth-century planned town in Wales, Aberaeron, to pay for the new building which cost £10,000, an immense sum for those days.

Coates advised on technical matters and Denys Lasdun, another assistant to Coates, designed the elliptical terrace pool. Gwynne and Denys Lasdun became friends while working at Wells Coates's office. Gwynne claimed to have contributed a crucial design move that unlocked the rest of the Lasdun's design for the Royal College of Physicians building, placing it end-on to Regent's Park. Lasdun returned the compliment by designing The Homewood's pool.

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