Words: Candia Lutyens
Image: Courtesy of Candia Lutyens
Castle Drogo is generally thought to be the last true castle built in England. It was commissioned by Julius Drewe (1856-1931), a wealthy, self-made retailer. He believed – certainly erroneously, he added the E to his surname Drew – that he claimed descendance from a Norman baron, Drogo de Teign, from whose name the Dartmoor village of Drewsteignton, in which the castle sits, was derived. Clearly with aspirations to lose the “nouveau” prefix to his riches, he bought into the conceit and, with it, 450 acres of land around the village.
Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) was in 1910 still relatively young but, under the patronage of Country Life and its editor Edward Hudson (for whom he built three houses) had become well known as a builder of old-style country estates for newly moneyed aspirant owners. He was not particularly keen on Drewe’s demand for a castle, writing to his wife, “I do wish he didn’t want a castle but just a delicious loveable house with plenty of good large rooms in it".
Despite his initial reservations, Lutyens appears to have been happy to go gung-ho with the brief. His early sketches suggest a building of gargantuan size but, with the intervention of the First World War, coming with it the practical non-availability of labour and materials and also the death in that conflict of Drewe’s eldest son, the building was reduced to about a third of the original proposal. The building that now stands is the east wing of the proposed whole; it was to have been matched by a west wing of similar proportions, the two joined at the north side by a linking building in which there was to have been a great baronial hall. Even severely reduced, the castle took 20 years to build and it was completed in 1930, just one year before the death of Julius Drewe.
The castle at first glance has the appearance of a medieval watch tower with mullioned windows and baronial features complete with crenelations but on closer inspection, it is clear that elements of the exterior are almost modernist in feel and the interiors, typified by intersecting planes with arches of differing size are positively classical. Yet true, to his Arts & Crafts heritage, Lutyens insisted that the main material of the house was entirely local – granite, quarried on Dartmoor, much of it from Drewe’s own quarries.
A battle lost by Lutyens was his desire for pitched rooves. Drewe insisted on them being flat and Lutyens was forced to develop new techniques for roof building, largely from concrete. This ultimately was a disastrous decision on the part of the owner as the rooves were never successfully waterproofed and have been an on-going headache for the castle’s current owners, the National Trust. The flat roofscape is however a thing of joy to clamber over and was used in the summer as an outdoor living space for the family and playground for the children. It is from the roof, if you are there at the right time of year and lucky enough to be allowed up there, that you can look out over the planted woodland surrounding the castle and see etched into the canopy of trees the giant letters J and D in trees of a foliage several shades lighter than their neighbours.
In 1915, Gertrude Jekyll, garden designer and long-time collaborator with Lutyens was bought in to landscape the gardens and design the planting. They remain full of mature rhododendrons and magnolias and a visit during flowering season in early May is the greatest of treats.
By the time the building was nearing completion Lutyens had been designing furniture for his buildings for some years. Notable in Castle Drogo is the furniture he designed for the basement level kitchen. Lit only from above by a large circular oculus, it was obvious that the centre piece of the main kitchen should be a circular table sitting beneath it and thus the famous Drogo Kitchen Table came into being. The table was originally constructed in Oak and was six feet in diameter. Its style echoes the baronial feel of its surroundings with Lutyens’s more usual Tuscan Column legs given weight and mass by an exaggerated entasis. The six legs are echoed in a hexagonal pattern on the table-top which radiates out in three rings. Adjoining the kitchen is the scullery and for this Lutyens repeated the circular design with a rectangular and somewhat simpler version of the table.
Castle Drogo remains an architectural gem and is open to the public through the National Trust, it was the first twentieth century building acquired by the LT and remains one of the more important buildings in their collection. The last castle to be built in England.