The house at Munstead Wood

Sitting Room

This is a generous room which features a wide hooded stone-built fireplace. There are broad shallow stairs, with sturdy oak bannisters, leading directly off it, first to the book room landing and entrance and then a middle landing with a very generous window. The room also includes a direct door out to the south terrace which is planted with scented roses, rosemary and lavender, which perfume the air on summer evenings.

Workshop

Jekyll wrote that from childhood she had always felt ‘at home’ in a workshop and it was clear she must have one in her own purpose-built home at Munstead Wood. The workshop is accessed by a Jekyll carved and inlaid door, which still survives today and clearly shows the importance of the space to her. Inside it provides a large well-lit space, with sunken shelved alcoves around the fireplace to display, as well as store her materials, tools and ceramic treasures.

A large carpentry bench, writing table and drawered storage were also once a feature of the room. This is where she worked on woodcarving, gilding, inlay, shell pictures, silver repoussé and gesso. This was also the hub of her business activities and where she did her writing and garden designs.

Gallery

Jekyll collected a huge array of keepsakes from her many travels abroad and within Britain. These treasures ranged from natural shells, birds’ eggs and feathers to bronze coins, venetian glass, and church embroideries. To house these riches safely from the ‘fatal flicks of the household duster’ and to give the opportunity for a daily glimpse of her most favoured things, Lutyens designed a large, glazed display cabinet to be a feature of her long gallery.

The gallery is about ten feet wide, with beautiful oak trusses and is cantilevered out for half its width with its northern windows overlooking the most formal part of the garden. Further oak panelled cupboards and drawers were once home to a wide collection of cottons, silks and linens also collected by Jekyll on her travels.

Bookroom

Through an arched entrance, is a small but beautifully proportioned room of bookshelves, with an inlaid corner cupboard and once home to Jekyll’s collection of gardening books, musical scores and literature. Jekyll said this room gave a ‘precious feeling of repose’ which helped her to study. There is an enticing view out to the Woodland Garden, which invites the imagination to take over as the edge of the paths disappear from sight.

This room and perhaps her workshop, were the places where her ideas and writing really took flight. She wrote 14 books (one a year from 1899) and over a thousand articles right up until her death in 1932 and this is how her ideas spread to both a national and international audience.

Flower Shop

Next to her workshop – and with a door opening directly onto her garden – is Jekyll's flower shop. Not a shop for selling things, but the floral equivalent of the workshop. Here she would have brought in the flowers and foliage she’d cut in the garden, soaked the stems overnight if needed, and arranged in a selection of vases and bowls for display in the house.

Jekyll had some very particular rules for flower arranging, which she shared in her book Flower Decoration for the House, published in 1907. She ensured that flowers co-ordinated with the interior decoration of her rooms, noting flowers that worked in contrast and colours that should be avoided, and even advising on colours that worked best under electric lighting.

She also designed her own vases which she commissioned a glassmaker to create for her, as she could find nothing quite right for her purposes. These were available to buy commercially, and known as ‘Munstead glasses’.

Darkroom

In 1885, almost a decade before she was instructing Lutyens as to her wishes for her home, Jekyll started taking photographs which she described as ’to see pictures for oneself, not merely to see objects’. To accommodate this further artistic endeavour, he created a darkroom for her in the cellar, which allowed just sufficient light through a low arched window to allow her to work and shutters to give blackout conditions to develop her glass photographic plates.

Jekyll's photographs became integral to her sharing her knowledge and ideas through her publishing and were particularly relevant when showcasing both garden and flower arranging designs. The room still survives with some of its original fittings and, although others were experimenting with photography at the end of the nineteenth century, she was one of the first women to take photographs specifically for publication.

North Court and Tank Garden

At the north side of the house, with steps and paths laid out by Lutyens at the same time as the house was built, is the North Court. This somewhat formal layout of steps and paths, often using angles and curves to create geometrically interesting shapes, was typical of the designs Lutyens went on to produce for his many clients.

In their garden collaborations, Jekyll was responsible for planting the beds around, adding the informality of her planting style to the formality of Lutyens’ geometry. This area has a strongly geometric led design with a semi-circle of ripple marked stone, evergreen borders, and a Clematis Montana swagged across the bottom of the gallery. Contrasting stone circles, square troughs and round box hedging complete the playful approach.

The tank pond is next to the North Court steps and this area has changed very little. There is a lion’s head mask on the side of the tank, which was designed by Jekyll’s friend, the artist George Leslie, and added some time after the tank was first built. We'd like to restore the feature to working order, so that water flows again from the lion’s mouth, replacing the current fountain that was never Jekyll’s intention for this pond.

Design details of Munstead Wood

Munstead Wood contains many delightful design details which give the house its unique character.