Dutch Gardens …
Dutch Garden - A life long work … The Venice Room … All the rooms in this house have a name, it is one of Trevor’s idiosyncrasies… This room has paintings on the walls of scenes of Venice ..
I was contacted by Channel 4 to ask if I would consider talking about Dutch Garden my Family home, owned by my father Trevor Wynne-Jones. He allow them to film his house, for two programs they were making. I decided not to be in either of the two programs. There will be plenty of time to talk about the many experience of growing up in a home like this at another time. However, I am inextricably intertwined with this property, it is part of my history & injected into my DNA... Trevor, now an elderly man of 86 was very happy to open his home to Channel 4 - he is very proud of all the work & is keen to show it off. The first program is with Hugh Dennis called Huge Homes which you can find on Channel 4 - All 4. Episode 3 or you can find it here:-
I have written about Dutch Garden before & some of my experiences back in 2019 … To be honest there is/are so many stories that I could tell you about this place and its conception from old wooden bungalow, with chicken coops & horse stable to where it is now … An extravaganza of a property amalgamated with all styles & every eclectic taste & so very many, many rooms one refracting from another … Dutch Garden is the reason & always has been for my father - Trevor Wynne-Jones existence, it is what he has spent his life & money doing, he has never deviated from the theme & there has never been a greater love in his life… It remains his mistress & his captor…. Everything Trevor does is through the prism that is Dutch Garden he is very proud of it, as he should be, otherwise what would be the point of completely devoting his life to such a project with the exclusion of all other things outside of making money to pay for it! Nothing has been more important to him than Dutch Garden.
Recently, I took my three children to see the property before the launch of the Channel 4 programs, I had not been to the house for many years & they only saw it when they were much younger, it dominated my younger life but is totally peripheral to my children’s, albeit interesting to them on this visit.
Over the years the property has evolved from one design to another, when Trevor first designed the house with my mother Josephine it was in some parts based on the style of their view of a Spanish hacienda, that lasted for a while before Trevor tore it down & created something else, once he has another idea everything is changed, he rips out the old to start with a new collaboration of designs. Something both of his wives have found exasperating at times. Dutch Garden has loomed heavily in all our lives, one way or another, it is Trevor’s alter ego. My son Ruben commented on his grandfather …. ‘There is no removing Dutch Garden from Trevor or Trevor from Dutch Gardens - they are one and the same thing. They only exist combined’ .
Now it is coming to the end of an era, Trevor is elderly he is rude physical health, but his once Machiavellian, clever mind is now forgetful although he remains ever positive. He says, perhaps he will try & sell the property & live the life he has always wanted to live - ‘A painter an artist in Venice’ - or perhaps he will remain at Dutch Garden?
Please find links to my earlier stories…
A further program will be shown on Channel 4 about Dutch Garden hosted by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen - I believe it will air later this year ..
The infamous ‘pond’ the bridge when I was young was arched with no hand rail, it was lethal in the winter because it was almost impossible to walk over having such a sheer curve, you would slip & slide. Mostly our friends fell in, which meant swimming & wading through thick ‘duck weed’ to the edge of the pond & scrambling out over the bog garden. Most outfits did not survive this test! - It was like falling into wet quick sand …. In the summer .. If you walked over the bridge, which was the quickest way to the kitchen you had to take on a large old Victorian plumb tree, which hung over the top of the bridge and through the arches in the bridge wall. The problem here was that the over ripening fruit housed hidden wasps, which became drunk on the fruit & extremely aggressive.. On occasions if you picked the plumbs they would vibrating in your hand with a very angry wasp inside…
The duck weed was a caused by the duck family that would join us every year to have their ducklings, our Yorkshire terrier Charlie hated the ducks, if you mention the word he would launch himself off the terrace & straight into the water barking madly. I have happy memories of being up at night wading around in the water with Trevor rescuing the tiny ducklings, who had got caught in the duck weed, we would try and revive them in the boiler room. Once the ducklings had got older the parents used to come into the kitchen through the open door & harass us for food. You had to be really careful chasing them back outside because if you did it too quickly they would poo all over the floor in disgruntlement!
If you are wondering about the duck weed & why it was not removed. That is the problem with duck weed, once it gets into a pond it is impossible to get rid of, the pond was cleared a couple of times a year, trying hard not to catch the many fish in the pond that got tangled in the weed.
‘The Hill’ - or the ‘mound’ if you prefer.. This mound has changed many times over the years, the mound of earth was created using a digger & a dumper truck. One morning when no one was about my brother & I got in the dumper truck. He tried to drive it up the mound, unfortunately the soil was not solid & it overturned, thankfully my brother was thrown clear & I ended up under the bucket, he had to dig me out … This did not go down well with Trevor… One of the very many designs of the Hill was a sheer drop to the other side of the hill, the soil was banked up against a high wall made of London cobble stones. Trevor had even bought a machine to polish these stones? My friend and I used to roll along the top of the hill & pick up quite a speed, we were eventually banned from doing this, not because of an obvious health & safety issue, that we would fall to our death off the high wall, but because Trevor didn’t like the lawn to be squashed! We were banned from having picnic’s sitting on it - for the same reasons!
Poppy the dachshund was a female, she too was banned from weeing on the lawn as she left brown & yellow marks, but Poppy didn’t know she was banned so when she went on the lawn, my mother would charge around after her with a saucepan full of water to pour over the offending tinkle! You couldn’t make this stuff up!
The right hand part of the rockery. One pool runs into another, with large slate steps running through it, the slate was like a skating ring, when wet, it was another area where people would fall in the fountains many ponds. On one occasion Trevor was giving a speech standing on one of the slate steps, extoling the virtues of how he had managed to slice through this thin slate making it wafer thin, half way through the speech the slate gave way and he descended into the nearest pool… He was livid… On another occasion I was watching telly in the house, it was summer & the door was open… I could hear these strange sounds & calling. Dutch Garden was always full of people doing & building strange stuff & making funny sounds, so I turned the TV up… After a while I became curious so I turned the TV down again & the calling continued? So I got up off the chesterfield sofa & went outside to investigate… Following the noise I came across my mother wedged into one of the crevasses that lurked between the slate, she had fallen from another level and was stuck, she had unfortunately damaged her back! Never a dull moment at DG!
This was where the kitchen was originally. The terrace was smaller & the grass ran up to the edge of the pond, again it did not have the railings that are now in place. As there was no definitive line of where the grass stopped & the pond started this meant that people could not tell where the grass stopped & the water with the ‘duck weed’ stared, so once again people would fall into the pond, by assuming the duck weed was a continuation of the grass! At one of Trevor’s business parties a very tall banker stepped off the step & disappeared under the water, with crystal glass in one hand & cigar in the other, he reappeared, scrambled out of the pond via the bog garden & later attended the restaurant dressed in one of Trevor’s suits, the trousers only just covered his knees. - What a good sport, he was!
This is now where the kitchen is - below ground - Trevor has an obsession about digging down, a mole in an previous life? The creeper hides the stone work which is extremely intricate in design. The roof lights are covered with lead & are an extreme design, but every attention to detail has been covered. This is hours & hours of drawings & design, by Trevor at his desk - he tells everyone that he is hard at work, when really it is his own personal passion that he is doing… This is his obsession …
This part of the garden is based on Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire. One of this area’s previous designs was a lawn with a path running through it leading to what was the original rose garden, the area was like an old fashion walled garden. Trevor got bored of that so Trevor dug under the house & then erected a huge structures from out of the ground - it was lethal when it was being built, there were boards & scaffolding all over the place, we were not supposed to go into the area with friends, which means of course we did! There is a story about the floor in the lounge falling away when I was sitting watching tv, because of insufficient propping of the RSJ’s. This story can be found in the other stories the link is above, My Family Home.
My friend & I used to launch big pieces of wood on the water that accumulated in the hole dug under the house & boat under the house on the water, it was creepy, but fun…
Looking down into Trevor’s Abbey
The huge tree in the background, there is two; back in the day the lower branches used to kiss the ground & we used to hide underneath them & get covered in pin needles …
This fireplace gives me ‘chills’, a story for another time. It was part of the small lounge/sitting room, now the fire has gone & it now forms part of Trevor’s bedroom ..
Below ground … The sitting room looking out onto the Abbey …. This area was all completed after I had left Dutch Garden for good. My mother had long gone & Trevor was free & with enough money to do what he wanted without any restraint - There was a small modicum of control when my mother was still with him. Without doubt the brickwork is very fine, there are speakers that pump out music & this is where Trevor chooses to spend most of his time relaxing. There is ‘of course’ a throne room down here & a galley kitchen.
This room leads off into other area’s & large rooms all underground - Bedrooms, reception rooms & more rooms… Some finished, some not ..
The downstairs dinning room with bespoke table & dresser… with ‘fresco’ style paintings on the walls & ceilings. It just goes meandering on & on, with no real structure like a normal home, just another idea that Trevor has had that is attached to the room he has just finished… & so it goes on!
Nothing on here or on line really gives the magnitude & size of this property with its myriad of styles & designs the property continues to mushroom & grow with no real purpose other than it is one mans dreams turned into reality .. a monument to Trevor & his passion for this property.
In an interview for a newspaper circa 2019, when Trevor was filmed, which is on line, the interviewer asked ‘why do you do it?’ Trevor replied …. ‘Because I can!’ Trevor never sees beyond that!
I don’t believe that Trevor will ever be able to leave Dutch Garden its control over him is absolute & for anyone else to have it might be just too much for him - Who Knows? … Oscar Wilde quote about control from The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
