ELEMEN - Robert Couturier

Built at the turn of the century, Marshcourt is
one of architect Edwin Lutyens’s most notable
English country houses. Designer Robert
Couturier recently gave the home’s interiors a
stylish dressing up. For details see Sources.
E L E ME N TS
OF
SUR PR ISE
In the hands of designer Robert Couturier, a proper English manor by
architect Edwin Lutyens gets a smart, sophisticated, and slightly daring update
TEXT BY ANTHONY GARDNER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIM BEDDOW
PRODUCED BY HOWARD CHRISTIAN
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marshcourt, hidden in the hampshire, england,
landscape 75 miles to the southwest of London, is nothing if not eccentric. To begin with, it is built of chalk,
a material that had not been in regular use for two
centuries at the time of its construction—in the early
1900s—and certainly not for a 12-bedroom country
house. Inside, its architect, Edwin Lutyens, creatively blended Tudor and Jacobean features (paneled
rooms, carved staircases, mullioned windows) with
neoclassical details (marble columns, elaborate plasterwork ceilings). And now, in the hands of New York–
based interior designer Robert Couturier, the home has
become more singular still.
“My natural tendency would be to look at Lutyens’s
books and think you have to have Elizabethan or neoGothic furniture here,” he says. “But then it would
become very boring. We soon realized that contemporary furniture would jolt the house to life.”
Above: The library,
with its framed view
of the dining room,
contains a 1940s
Fritz Henningsen armchair upholstered
in goat leather and
an antique wing chair
in silk damask by
Claremont. Opposite:
The library’s rippling
light, suspended
from the original
plasterwork ceiling,
is by Ingo Maurer.
The vintage lounge
chairs are by Vladimir
Kagan; the velvet club
chairs were custom
made, and the large
ottoman is covered in
a Sultanabad carpet.
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The family who bought Marshcourt two and a half
years ago agreed, and worked closely with Couturier
on the decor (previous owners had already updated
the heating and plumbing systems). “They understood
that the house had to have a personality,” the designer
says. “We live in the 21st century, not the 1920s. It’s a
classic country house looking into the future.”
One of Lutyens’s best-known creations, Marshcourt
was built in 1904 for a stockbroker and sportsman
named Herbert Johnson. The layout of the residence
and its gardens, the latter designed with the architect’s
favorite collaborator, Gertrude Jekyll, was determined
partly by Lutyens’s love of surprises and partly by the
site. The dwelling faces north on a spur overlooking the
River Test, with the central block tucked back between
two projecting wings. The ground drops away sharply
on the west and south sides but rises on the east, terrain
that inspired a lively multilevel garden of hedged and
balustraded terraces—echoed inside by corridors with
galleries and half-landings arranged to provide a feeling
of intimacy. “People say that it’s a very big house, but it
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doesn’t feel big,” Couturier observes. Lutyens’s genius
was combining grandeur with coziness.
Given Marshcourt’s scale, the entrance hall is not
what you expect: It has a fine limestone floor and a
plasterwork ceiling, but its dimensions are low and narrow. So when you enter a library that is almost twice
the entrance hall’s height, the effect is spectacular;
and when you step out onto the lawn and look at the
enormous rear façade, inset with magnificent leaded
windows and topped by towering redbrick barley-twist
chimneys, you realize that the house has a cannily withholding quality, delaying its moments of greatest drama
until after you’ve passed through.
Couturier shares Lutyens’s playfulness and fondness
for mixing styles and eras. The first hint of this comes
right in the entrance hall, where a steel chair by Ron
Arad stands in one corner and a pink cardboard chair
by Frank Gehry in another. Couturier’s most daring
statement, however, is in the library, where a huge,
gold-color, ribbon-shaped ceiling light by Ingo Maurer
stretches from one end of the room to the other. The
Above, from left:
In the drawing room,
the patinated-steel
Cerberino table
by Maurizio Cattelan
is flanked by a pair
of Victor Courtray
rush-seat chairs and
lit by a circa-1960
French floor lamp.
The dining room’s
brass-and-frostedglass light fixture
is a 1964 design by
Gio Ponti, the
oak-and-bronze table
is by Hervé Van der
Straeten, and the
vintage chairs are by
Carlo di Carli.
The custom-made
Georgian-style
wing chairs in the
library alcove
are upholstered in a
hand-embroidered
fabric from Robert
Kime; the pendant
lamp is by Maurer,
and the TG-10 sling
chairs and marble
Angelo Mangiarotti
table are vintage.
archdigest.com 153
The charmingly antique gardens
by Gertrude Jekyll, a frequent
Lutyens collaborator, offer sweeping views of the Hampshire
countryside. Below: In the sunken
garden, rows of boxwood line
a lily pond. Opposite, clockwise
from top: A herringbone brick path
passes under a rose-covered
pergola. Marshcourt, with its
leaded windows and barley-twist
chimneys, is most impressive
when viewed from the rear. A row
of terra-cotta amphorae
under climbing grapevines.
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light had to be shipped all the way from Hong Kong and
fitted by a team from Germany. “We were all thinking,
If we’re making a mistake, what are we going to do?”
Couturier says. “But it made the structure of the room
more what it is, more exciting.”
The focus of frequent weekend entertaining, the
library is also central to the other ground-floor reception areas, with the dining room on one side and drawing room on the other. The dining room’s glory is its
rich walnut paneling, which spreads up from the walls
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to frame part of the ceiling—a circle of plaster fruit and
foliage whose center Couturier has brightened with
gilding and a Gio Ponti brass light fixture from 1964. In
the nearby billiard room, an extraordinary carved-chalk
table (now accompanied by a burgundy Zaha Hadid
sofa) takes pride of place; the ballroom, a Lutyens addition from the ’20s, is dominated by a great mullioned
and transomed window, which is ingeniously balanced
by an identical mirror. Here and elsewhere, Couturier
had the original light fixtures painstakingly reproduced,
Left: The billiard
room’s Zaha Hadid
sofa for Sawaya &
Moroni and pair
of vintage Italian armchairs complement
a reproduction by
Lutyens Furniture &
Lighting of the original billiard-table light.
Opposite, from top:
The ballroom, added
to Marshcourt in the
’20s, features chandeliers reproduced from
the originals. The
French sea-green
vases arrayed across
the kitchen counter
and breakfast table
are ’50s Primavera.
relying on period photographs of the newly built house
that were published in the magazine Country Life.
The designer’s favorite space is the master bedroom
upstairs, where he has boldly painted the paneling in
shades of white. “I’m not very reverential,” he admits.
“I don’t think you should let the house dictate what you’re
going to do. The paint makes the room incredibly light
and airy, neither masculine nor feminine, but very soft.”
White raffia-embroidered curtains and monochromatic
textured rugs enhance the buoyant, sophisticated air.
In the garden, there is still restoration to be done.
The bones of Gertrude Jekyll’s design survive—the
exquisite sunken garden, the long begonia walk, the pergolaed rose and vine walks, the herringbone redbrick
paths, and the boxwood and yew hedges. But her planting records have been lost, so there is no way of precisely
replicating the original. Not that Marshcourt’s owners
are unduly worried. Like Lutyens, they have discovered
the delight of using—in Couturier’s phrase—“elements
from the past, but in a different language.”
Clockwise from top
left: The master
dressing room
includes a ’50s Ponti
desk and chair and
a circa-1910 dressingtable mirror. A bath,
with an expansive
leaded window. In the
tiled bathroom,
the handblown-glass
ceiling light by
Lutyens Furniture &
Lighting is a reproduction of the original. Opposite, from
top: A guest room
features a ’40s mirror
by FontanaArte and
curtains of a brocade
by Christopher
Hyland. The master
bedroom’s custommade four-poster
was inspired by a ’70s
design by Maria
Pergay, and the Jean
Royère sofa beneath
the window is covered in a mohair by
Dedar; the ’60s Pierre
Paulin lounge chair
is upholstered in an
Edelman leather.
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