The Homewood

Alban Gwynne, a commander in the Royal Navy, and his wife, Ruby Gywnne (), moved to Homewood in Esher, Surrey, in 1914. At first they rented the property, but later purchased it outright. By the mid-1930s, the original Victorian house was in need of repairs and, with noise levels from the adjacent A3 road increasing, the Gwynnes chose to build a replacement dwelling on a new site on the northern part of their land. The new house, called The Homewood, was designed by Patrick Gwynne, a 24-year-old architect and the son of Alban and Ruby Gwynne. The family sold land that Alban Gwynne had inherited in Aberaeron, Wales, to finance the construction work. Kenneth Powell, a journalist, writes that…

and completed in 1931]] The Homewood was designed in the modernist style by Patrick Gwynne in the late 1930s. Gwynne was influenced by the work of Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect and pioneer of modern architecture in the early 20th century, and his design of the Villa Savoye, on the outskirts of Paris, in particular. Neil Bingham, Gwynne's biographer and an architecture historian, recognises the influence of the Villa Savoye in the east side of the bedroom wing of The Homewood, and Kenneth Powell, an architectural critic and historian, writes that Gwynne's design "is a free interpretation of that iconic Corbusier house, an all-white block apparently floating on slender columns."…