A fairy house

A stylish 1920s home brought the glamour of the theatre and Hollywood, as well as the most recent fashions of healthy living, to an incomparable Surrey setting, as Clive Aslet explains

-  Clive Aslet

Marylands, Surrey The home of Anna Hunter

ON December 10, 1928, The Times announced that Betty Rowlands -a soprano who had performed at the Holborn Empire, whose father, Robert Pugh Rowlands, was Surgeon to Guy's Hospital in London-had become engaged to the 41-year-old architect Oliver Hill. The Rowlandses lived at Hurtwood Edge, an Italianate house of 1910 that had been built on the sandstone ridge of Pitch Hill. In this case, 'pitch' meant a short steep slope; it had a garden that they opened to the public, offering teas at 1s 6d. Hill's marriage did not, on this occasion, come off: it would be another 25 years before he took his wife, Titania 43 years younger than him-to the altar. But the projected union bore architectural fruit, as, the following year, he began to design Marylands-originally called Hurtwood, then Maryland without the 's' on the same ridge. His client was the music publisher Montague Cecil Warner.

It was not only the Rowlandses who had discovered Pitch Hill. To the south-east of Marylands, Philip Webb had built Coneyhurst (from an alternative name for Pitch Hill) in the 1880s. On west side, a little below Marylands, the architect/craftsman Alfred Powell-who worked for Wedgwood with his wife, Louise, a fellow decorator of pottery had created Long Copse on radical Artsand-Crafts lines. Next to Marylands stands Copse Hill, designed by Christopher Turnor in 1908 in a manner that, with low, spreading eaves and window shutters, could almost be Swiss (COUNTRY LIFE, October 29, 2008). The use of Copse in both names indicates that the slope was covered in woods.