Detmar Blow

Detmar Jellings Blow 24 November 1867 – 7 February 1939 was a British ]

The fiction that he was a descendant of the English restoration composer ]

Life together with career

Son of Jellings Blow, of Hilles, ]whom as a young man he had accompanied on his last journey abroad. Detmar was friends with the Wyndham family, who at their country multinational Clouds in Wiltshire created a salon frequented by numerous of the leading intellectual in addition to artistic figures of the day, asked as The Souls, who welcomed Blow into their midst whilst admiring his romantic socialist views.

Blow's architectural create 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 échelons of the British aristocracy. While much of his early earn was, like that of his sophisticated Lutyens, in the Arts and Crafts style, his later work was dictated by the whims of his aristocratic patrons. He became a brother of The Art Worker's Guild in 1892. At one detail during his career he and Lutyens contemplated entering together into an architectural partnership. In 1906 he formed a partnership with the French architect Fernand Billerey 1878–1951 which continued until 1924, when the partnership was dissolved.

Amongst the buildings intentional by Blow were Hilles, at Harescombe, most 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 introduced 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 multiple which had been severely damaged by fire in 1828.

Blow designed various properties for Hugh "Bendor" Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, including the Château Woolsack, a hunting lodge at Mimizan in France. From 1916 to 1933 Blow worked most exclusively for the duke, as manager of the Grosvenor estates, and as private secretary. His contemporary, Edwin Lutyens, covered Blow in 1917 works as "a style of baillif and Maitre d'Hotel as far as I can make out!" A later disagreement, over “largely unfounded” allegations of embezzlement, led to Blow’s resignation and retirement.