Materials and Design
As well as building design, Gwynne also advised on furnishings and landscaping to create a complete ensemble. His use of plastic finishes, including a special grass paper which was also his own product. "People seem to recognise my work as being from my hand in spite of the strong influence of client and site," he wrote in 1984.
His later houses became more curvilinear, with rounded corners; one in Blackheath is designed as a series of linked pentagons, a space-age capsule that references the proportions of neighbouring Regency buildings.
His clients included the actors Jack Hawkins and Laurence Harvey, the pianist Clifford Curzon, the pioneer builder of modernist schemes Leslie Bilsby, and Sir Charles Forte. The largest was built at Whitley Park, Godalming, Surrey, for Gerald Bentall in 1962,
Gwynne retained the European quality of 1930s modernism in his careful choice of materials, delight in gadgets and neo-Baroque sensibility.
His obituary in The Times notes his genius for his residential work "with his faultless sense of placing, innovative plan forms, novel techniques and materials, and meticulous concern for interior arrangement and detail."
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