The 'King's favourite architect' bows out after 60 years of excellence and keeping the flame of Classicism alive in the dark decades of Modernism

At the age of nearly 90, Quinlan Terry has decided to retire. This is a major event in the history of British architecture since the Second World War. Terry, a symbol of the enduring power of tradition, is widely revered for his knowledge of Classicism and load-bearing construction, for which he has earnt a dedicated following of admirers both in this country and the USA.

Beautifully crafted, often from well-chosen stone or handmade brick, his buildings may look even better after half a century of weathering than when first unveiled. Equally, he has been the lightning rod for architects of a different persuasion, the Modernists who felt threatened by a resurgence of tried-and-tested styles associated with The King. They became particularly incensed whenever Terry expanded his range beyond the country house, his acknowledged forte, and into the commercial areas that they regarded as their preserve. The triumph of Richmond Riverside, a range of office buildings next to Richmond Bridge in west London, in a Picturesque medley of historically inspired façades (Fig 8), showed that there was an alternative to the ugly monolithic blocks being offered by most conventional practitioners.

Mr Terry has also designed college buildings in Cambridge, a cathedral for Brentwood, Essex (Fig 5), and a small hospital at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, London SW3 (Fig 6). He never designed a classical airport, but some challenges must be left to his successors in the movement to revive Classical architecture, which he did so much to foster.

Born on July 24, 1937, Mr Terry grew up in Hampstead, the son of a lawyer father and an artist mother who were close friends of the Modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger; during the Second World War, the Terrys and Goldfinger were evacuated together to the house that Berthold Lubetkin built for himself at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire. They met an even more famous Modernist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, when he came to receive the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gold medal.

Acutely sensitive to the horrors of comprehensive redevelopment that took place as he was growing up, the young Quinlan reacted against his parents’ liberalism. After Bryanston in Dorset, where he excelled at art, he enrolled at the Architectural Association (AA), which did not prove to be a spiritual home — the tutors for his fourth and fifth years were prominent Brutalists.

His despair at the state of the world was expressed in a linocut ironically entitled The House of Joy, depicting a ruined chapel adorned with Biblical quotations on the theme of desolation and decay. It was at the AA, however, that he met the young Polish girl, Christine de Ruttié, descended from one of Napoleon’s generals, whom he married. His happy family and deep Christian faith became the rocks on which his life was built (Fig 3).

That life would not be based in London. In 1962, he drove his 1929 open-topped Alvis to Constable Country on the Essex/Suffolk border (trouble with the car meant that he arrived untypically late) for an interview at the Dedham office of Raymond Erith. Erith himself had left the capital in the 1930s.

Although he had been commissioned to restore the most famous Georgian townhouses in Britain — Nos 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street — after the Second World War, Erith’s practice was restricted both by its rural location and his dedication to Classicism. Previously, Mr Terry’s rebellion against the Modernist orthodoxy had taken an Arts-and-Crafts form, but in Classicism he found an answer to his spiritual need for order and human scale. Erith accepted him, effectively as a pupil.

The firm survived on a diet of bathroom extensions, leaking roofs and smoking chimneys, and might not have kept going at all had Erith not had a private income, but the experience acquired during the 1960s and 1970s gave Mr Terry an intimate understanding of traditional construction and building materials.

He had enough free time to decorate the family home — a converted farmworker’s cottage, aptly called Winter-floods — in trompe-l’oeil. Although he became Erith’s partner in 1966, work was so slack that he could leave for Rome in 1968 on a scholarship, where he drew monuments from the ancient world to the Baroque. The Roman Sketchbook that he assembled would be the foundation stone of his later career.

During his absence, a ray of hope shone into the old timber-frame building, once used as a rural telephone exchange, that was the Erith and Terry office. Sir Thomas Pilking-ton had enquired about rebuilding his Victorian country house, Kings Walden Bury in Hertfordshire. By the standard of Erith’s previous commissions, often exquisite, but usually small, the new building was to be on an unprecedented scale — so much so that Erith urged his colleague to keep a notebook of the creation of what then seemed might be the last hurrah of the country house.

This he did, creating a visual diary of the greatest elegance, accompanied by a doom-laden text; he also made a linocut, which is a masterpiece of its genre. After the completion of Kings Walden Bury in 1971, the office was kept afloat by another remarkable commission — an enormous temple for the Bahá’í faith’ in Tehran, Iran. This project did not survive the fall of the Peacock throne in 1979, but for several years provided the mainstay of Erith and Terry after Erith’s death in 1973.

Although Terry built his subsequent career on that of his mentor, he and Erith were fundamentally different personalities. Worshipping Sir John Soane, Erith was a rationalist whose spare style, although Classical, was suited to its time: he dreamt that it might be possible to combine Modernism and Classicism, although the idea never took root. Terry, by contrast, loathed Modernism, the structural failings of which were illustrated by the partial collapse of Ronan Point, a 22-storey block in east London, two months after it was opened, causing the death of five people.

By temperament, he was drawn to ornament more than austerity. He excelled in the design of finials, urns, fountains and free-standing columns, often with self-imposed complications. This meant that he was ideally positioned to take advantage of the new mood of confidence among private clients that characterised the 1980s, gung-ho individuals who wanted to demonstrate the triumph of free enterprise in stone.

Alistair (later Lord) McAlpine, Margaret Thatcher’s treasurer of the Conservative Party, commissioned numerous follies for his garden at West Green House, Hampshire, leased from the National Trust, including a nymphaeum and an elliptical gadrooned urn with spiral flutes that took Terry a whole month to draw out. For Michael and Anne (later Lord and Lady) Heseltine at Thenford, Northamptonshire, he designed a Mannerist orangery-cum-swimming-pool pavilion in contrasting colours of stone, marmalade Horton for the walls and oat-coloured Clipsham for the columns, pilasters and dressings.

A handful of clients pioneered the revival of the country house (Fig 2). They usually trod carefully, unsure of how long the boom times would last. Building a new country house was likely to excite comment. People with big ideas scaled them back, trimming the dimensions of rooms to an extent that they regretted when they came to live in the finished home.

Externally, these compact buildings can betray Mr Terry’s frustration as an architect, as they may be too small for the architectural exuberance that they support. Flamboyant façades may be the prelude to quite basic plan types, dominated by an overlarge staircase hall: they did not always suit families wanting a big live-in kitchen. A client who wanted, for example, an old rectory to be refaced might be rewarded with a dazzling Baroque façade, composed of a superimposed order of banded columns, walls and niches of knapped flint, and a skyline of extravagantly shaped urns, which could stand as a piece of sculpture by itself. This is what happened at Fawley House, near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.

As time went on, some owners were able to commission on a bigger scale and Terry now had a canvas appropriate to his architectural ideas. From 1994, the master was joined by his son Francis: for the decade after 2004, the firm became Quinlan and Francis Terry, a partnership that dissolved when Terry Jnr left to found his own practice, Francis Terry and Associates, in 2016. These years saw the construction of a castle on Brecqhou, in the Channel Islands, for Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, built around four sides of an internal courtyard (Fig 9). Sir David arrived with a sketchplan whose essentials were thereafter followed, creating what the late Prof David Watkin described as ‘the largest house built in Britain for at least two centuries’ after its completion in 1996.

This was followed, in 2000–02, by Lord and Lady Rothermere’s Ferne Park in Wiltshire, (Fig 1); when the main block — reduced from the original scheme — proved too small, cuboid wings with Venetian windows were added in 2011–12. In its sublime parkland setting, Ferne is the very ideal of a country house, handsomely proportioned, crafted from lightly mottled Chilmark stone, and detailed with exceptional refinement (Coun-try Life, May 5 and 12, 2010).

The firm did not rest on its laurels. After Ferne came Kilboy in Co Tipperary, Ireland, previously thought of as a ‘lost’ Irish house (it appeared in Country Life on September 7, 2016). It rose again in splendour, thanks to Shane Ryan, son of the founder of Ryanair, Tony Ryan. Kilboy is remarkable for its rich plasterwork and central hall with its sweeping staircase, lit by a coffered dome (Fig 7).

Although country houses occupied the bulk of Mr Terry’s working life, he did not confine himself to rich private clients. Richmond Riverside was designed for a developer who needed planning permission for a site near Richmond Bridge, London TW9. Proposals for a Modernist monolith had, thankfully, been turned down. In its stead, Mr Terry created a kind of architectural caprice, comprising a terrace of separate offices, each with its own façade, Palladian, Regency or Venetian.

Critics have scoffed, but, opened in 1988 by the Queen, it proved an instant hit with the public, the lawns that front the terrace now packed with cheerful crowds during the summer. Tourist guides can be heard to describe it as a precious survival from the 18th century, a mistake Terry regards as a badge of honour.

In 2010, work started on Queen Mother Square at Poundbury, Dorset, where no fewer than nine of the buildings were designed by Quinlan and Francis Terry, in a public space conceived by Léon Krier (Fig 10) . Arguably, the concept is too grand for its role as the centre of what is not a new town, but an urban extension to Dorchester, but it is undoubtedly splendid. Even the local supermarket (a branch of Waitrose) is a dream of propriety. One of his more recent small buildings is the jewel-like Tudor library tower (Fig 4) that arises for Sir Nicholas and Lady Coleridge’s Worcestershire house.

As Terry transitions from being — as some have termed him — ‘The King’s favourite architect’ to squire of Higham Hall, the Suffolk house in the manner of Soane where he and his family have lived since 1980, he can look back on a long career of personal achievement and much battle against the forces of Modernism.

Softly spoken and immaculately tailored, Terry may seem an unlikely controversialist, happier in the well-crafted arcadia of his home life than in the media, yet it was he above all others who kept the flame of Classicism alive through several dark and blusterous decades. This was a service to Western civilisation, given the centrality of the Classical tradition. His office continues under Roger Barrell. As he relaxes in his garden beside the Brenta, as Suffolk’s River Brett is sometimes called in this Palladio-loving household, we wish him a long and peaceful retirement.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.