Sandycombe Lodge is a finalist in the Civic Voice Design Awards. The awards are a national celebration of well-designed new build, heritage and public realm projects and Turner's House is the only entry from London. Get your votes in ASAP!
Newly refurbished Sandycombe Lodge, the country retreat of William Turner designed by the legendary landscape artist himself, has made it through to the final round of voting in the Civic Voice Design Awards. One of five finalists in the Historic Buildings category, it is the only heritage site from Greater London to make the cut.
Celebrating buildings of cultural significance, "The Civic Voice Design Awards are a wonderful opportunity for local communities up and down the country to nominate local buildings and designers for recognition," says President Griff Rhys Jones. "These awards show that people are willing to welcome the new developments we need when they have been properly consulted and involved and where the quality of design has been of the highest standard."
Officially opened back in April by two of Britain's most respected living artists – Christopher Le Brun PRA and Professor Ken Howard OBE, RA – the beautiful building the public can enjoy today is the culmination of several years hard work by the Turner's House Trust. After raising £2.4 million in charitable funding, the trust enlisted conservation architect Gary Butler of Butler Hegarty Architects to lovingly restore the country retreat to its former glory.
Butler and his team have really gone above and beyond with regards to making the renovation as true to the original as possible. Scouring historical archives for useful documents – like the below watercolour by William Havell – they built an incredibly detailed blueprint of what Turner's home would have looked like in its pomp before painstakingly restoring the building and its grounds based on what their research unearthed. The discovery of an ancient and rather grubby strip of wallpaper hidden in the wall space even allowed paint historian Helen Hughes to extrapolate the original wallpaper colour of the dining room from an analysis of its different paint layers.
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Watercolour by William Havell
When recreating the exact conditions of the original building proved infeasible, Butler and his team have added smart technical solutions to arrive at authenticity via artifice. For example, the sprawling expansion of London that has seen Twickenham go from the countryside retreat of Turner's time to the South West London suburbia we know today has resulted in a number of houses and trees blocking off the original views. To get around these impertinent obstructions, a local artist's recreation of the rural view that Turner would have seen out of his parlour window has been superimposed via digital projection on to the window of the current building. In addition, an ingenious digital telescope up in the artist's bedroom allows visitors to see the view that Turner would have had of the river.
The result is as genuine a recreation of Turner's vision as possible and this is significant because he took lessons in architectural draughtsmanship during his teens years and oft remarked that if he could have had his time again, he would have been an architect. As Sandycombe Lodge is the realisation of that ambition, it gives a unique insight in to his dreams and aspirations.
As Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, commented upon completion of the repairs: "Designed by Turner himself, Sandycombe Lodge is his largest work of art. It will provide a fascinating insight into his life, throwing light on his character, family and friends. Turner’s paintings and drawings housed at Tate Britain show what this great artist produced throughout his prolific lifetime but the Lodge will reveal a more intimate and domestic side of his important and complex story.”
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The view from the new digital telescope
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Artist's recreation of Turner's view from his parlour
Winning the Historic Buildings category of the Civic Voice Design Awards would be an additional feather in the cap of Sandycombe Lodge after Butler Hegarty Architects scooped two honours for its restoration at the prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects earlier this year, and I would encourage our fine readers to vote for Turner's former abode to help further establish it as a cultural mecca for all lovers of his work and reward the tireless efforts of the Turner's House Trust in achieving – as Turner once put it in his own dedicatory poem to Ivan Aivazovsky – such "bliss-wrought genius".
To vote for Sandycombe Lodge in the Civic Voice Design Awards head over to civicvoicedesignawards.com
To book a visit to Sandycombe Lodge head to turnershouse.org
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