Detmar Blow - Life and Career

Life and Career

Blow was one of the last disciples of John Ruskin whom as a young man he had accompanied on his last journey abroad. Blow was patronised by the Wyndham family, who at their country house Clouds in Wiltshire created a salon frequented by many of the leading intellectual and artistic figures of the day, known as The Souls, who welcomed Blow into their midst admiring his romantic socialist views.

Blow's architectural work was very much influenced by his mentors Ruskin, William Holman Hunt and Philip Webb, the architect of Clouds (1886). In his early career he adopted the role of the wandering architect, travelling artisan-like with his own band of masons from project to project. He married the aristocratic and intellectual Winifred Tollemache, and began to be patronised by the higher echelons of the British aristocracy. While much of his early work was, like that of his contemporary Lutyens, in the Arts and Crafts style, his later work was dictated by the whims of his aristocratic patrons. At one point during his career he and Lutyens contemplated entering together into an architectural partnership.

Amongst the buildings designed by Blow were Hilles, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, the mansion he built for himself after 1914, very much influenced by the ideals of Ruskin, Webb and William Morris (Blow was present at Morris's death and organised his funeral procession, driving the flower-strewn hay-wagon carrying the coffin, dressed in a farm worker's smock). In 1908 he rebuilt Bramham Park for the Lane Fox family; however, this commission was a restoration of the former Baroque house which had been severely damaged by fire in 1828.

Detmar Blow's grandson, also Detmar Blow, was married to the fashion stylist Isabella Blow, and lives at Hilles, Harescombe, Gloucestershire.