Following on form the success of The Collection of Ursula & Gordon Bowyer collection last October we are now pleased to present a further selection of period works from their 18th century London home, Maze Hill, in Five Centuries on 13 November 2025.
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Period Features at Maze Hill : The Collection of Ursula & Gordon Bowyer
3 November 2025
Douglas Girton
Architects Gordon and Ursula Bowyer were a remarkable couple, central to the foundation of modernism in post-war Britain. While earlier this year we successfully offered their important collection of Modern European art and design, here we turn instead to the historic heart of their world: the early-18th-century home at Maze Hill in Greenwich, and the distinguished earlier works that lived there alongside their modern pieces. These include period furnishings, including two German walnut chests of drawers, and a quietly remarkable group of 19th-century paintings and works on paper - among them works by Edward Lear and James McNeill Whistler.
Maze Hill was not merely the Bowyers’ residence; it was their anchor. The house where the abolitionist writer Olaudah Equiano once stayed, they spent their entire married life there, reluctant ever to leave its grace, its light, and its layered history. While Gordon and Ursula’s design language was forward-looking, Maze Hill revealed their deep appreciation for earlier craftsmanship and artistic tradition. Ursula once spoke of the delight she took in the patina of old furniture juxtaposed with Modern art and design.
The house itself carried the Bowyers' careful, quiet interventions. A sensitive picture window introduced a modern note, drawing the garden indoors and framing the light as if for a painting. Bespoke furniture by Robin Day and a breakfast table by Gordon coexisted harmoniously with the earlier pieces, the whole ensemble offering a lesson in how centuries might speak to one another in a home animated by curiosity and taste.
If the main sitting room at Maze Hill evoked the calm balance of Kettle’s Yard, elsewhere the house was more of a thoughtful cabinet of curiosities: pine-panelled stairs lined with pictures, 19th century prints and modernist watercolours placed in quiet dialogue, and shelves of books as abundant as the paintings. It was a place not only to live but to think —with kitchen, drawing room, dining room and studio opening into one another, light from the garden moving through the rooms just as conversations about art, history, and architecture once did.
