Philip had learnt at Eton the importance of external conformity in behaviour, whatever the true nature of the emotions that lie within, and the same principle was applied to Lympne. The mansion was a modern building, but made to look more established by being built from old bricks. As you approached the entrance to the house from the east, it presented the stylish yet conservative appearance of an old English manor. Philip also bought old garden statues from the country house sale at Stowe to add to the impression of the property’s longevity.fn4 Yet from the south side Port Lympne had an Italianate feel, with curved loggias extending from the house and a series of terraces below. As a final external feature Tilden created a great stone staircase to the west of the house which climbed the slope to the rear, seemingly rising like Jacob’s ladder to infinity. The staircase was decorated with fountains and pavilions supported by classical pillars, an homage to Lympne’s ancient heritage as a Roman port. It provided a sense of drama and ambition more akin to the golden age of Hollywood than to the Home Counties of England.
The greatest transformation came once you had crossed the threshold. As you went through the green bronze front door, you were transported into what Marie Belloc Lowndes called ‘a strange and beautiful house – a house which might have come right out of the pages of Hajji Baba of Ispahan’.fn5, 15 The oriental appearance of the interior gave free rein to Philip Sassoon’s more exotic creative ambitions and was completed at seemingly limitless expense. The drawing room had given him particular trouble. Just before the war, while watching the Josephslegende ballet, choreographed by Nijinsky for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Philip had fallen in love with the sets designed by the Catalan artist Josep Maria Sert.fn6 He commissioned Sert to paint a mural for the drawing room at Lympne, and the artist created a work which was an allegorical depiction of Germany’s defeat in the war. France was shown as a draped and crouching female figure being attacked by two German eagles. She was assisted by a flock of children representing the Allies, each wearing a headpiece from their national costume. The Indian Empire was portrayed by elephants which were shown on the broad breast of the fireplace in the centre of the room carrying all before them. The story ends with the German eagle being torn asunder, feathers flying.fn7
At that time Sert favoured painting in a monochrome style, but at Lympne he used tones of black and gold, rather than black and white, which while impressive were somewhat overbearing in the drawing room. Philip came to have grave doubts about Sert’s work. ‘Personally I think it monstrous,’ he wrote to his friend Sir Louis Mallet, adding that the work was
Of course ingenious in imagination and drawing – but so frightfully heavy that although the room is beautifully proportioned you feel impelled to throw yourself down on your belly and worm yourself through the door as the only alternative to battering out one’s brains against the ceiling – and from being a light sunny room brighter than the inside of an Osram bulb it is now so pitchy that you have to whip out a pocket electric torch even at midday or you’re as good as lost. And an awful cooked celery colour which gives you a liver attack before you can say knife. Unless Sert can alter it past all recognition it will have to go.16
In an attempt to salvage the situation Philip asked John Singer Sargent’s advice on how to complete the room. Sargent’s only comment on being introduced to Sert’s work was that the remaining uncovered walls should be ‘slabbed with marble the colour of chow’. Philip Tilden, who was given the task of executing the command, recalled that ‘this remark was typical for Sargent; he was never a man of many words, and no doubt we should have known what he meant. But there are many chow coloured dogs of many colours, and a whole day’s argument could not elucidate his meaning.’ By a process of elimination they settled on a warm, moss-brown marble, streaked with gold, which had to be created synthetically by a firm at the back of Marylebone Station in London.17
The drawing room was connected to a small library which looked over the terrace and out to the sea beyond. From the dark brooding colours of Sert’s room you were transported to a bright space with books lining the walls, all bound in a pinkish-red morocco leather and housed in wooden bookcases sheened with ‘gilver’ – silver with a tinge of gilt. The carpet was green and pink, with pink also used in the lining of the bookshelves and in the marble of the mantelpiece. Passing through the library you arrived in the dining room, with its walls lined with marble-effect lapis lazuli, producing an undulating and moving cover of cobalt blue. Set against this were golden chairs around the central table, with arms carved to resemble the wings of an eagle. The artist Glyn Philpot created a frieze depicting a scene from ancient Egypt of near-naked black men, described by Philip Tilden as ‘gesticulating and attitudinising figures’,18 working with animals.fn8 Looking back from the dining room, through the doors into the library and then on to the drawing room, you could enjoy the contrast of colours, tones and textures – the cobalt blue of the lapis lazuli giving way to the red, gold and pink of the library and leading to the brooding gold, black and mossy tones of the drawing room.
The most talked-about feature of the internal works was the creation of a Moorish patio in a courtyard at the centre of the mansion buildings, perhaps inspired by Sassoon’s visit to the Alhambra Palace. It was to be accessed from the first half-landing of the main staircase at the centre of the house through a sliding plate-glass electric door. The structure included white marble columns, white-stuccoed walls and brilliant green pantiles. The courtyard was decorated with fountains and running streams, orange trees and cypress hedges, and behind columns at the far end of the patio were two free-standing pink marble baths in an area that had the appearance of a Turkish hammam. The overall scene was reminiscent of Sir John Lavery’s painting of a Moorish harem, and was most certainly the feature of Port Lympne that Lady Honor Channon, the wife of Chips Channon, was referring to when she compared the house to a Spanish brothel.19
Port Lympne was not a place for sitting around; the interior stimulated rather than relaxed its guests. For this reason Philip Tilden added an additional library standing to the right of the main entrance to the mansion. It was a domed octagonal room, modelled on the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford, and designed to be a sanctuary from the rest of the house. Philip Sassoon’s private quarters were on the ground floor adjoining the front terrace, and his restless pace would dictate the rhythm of life at Lympne. He would go running in the grounds in the morning, and there were two tennis courts set at right angles to each other, so that as the sun moved through the sky you could still play without it being in your eyes. Tilden also designed a large marble swimming pool which was built below the terrace. The pool comprised three square sections making one rectangular-shaped bathing area. A fountain in the central pool required its own water supply after it was discovered that when fully operational it drained the resources for the whole area; a wave machine had also been built for the pool. Eventually they found that the weight of the marble pool was too great and it was in danger of sinking into the garden below, which led to it being redesigned around the single central pool which remains to this day.
Lympne was for entertaining, and particularly for summer parties. Philip wanted it to be a place, as Taplow Court had been for Lady Desborough, where his friends would choose to gather. The estate would also be a home to his small court of close friends who since the war had become like an extended family to him. In addition to Tilden, who was in semi-permanent residence while the works on the estate were completed, there was Sir Louis Mallet,fn9 who had rented a house from Philip on the edge of the estate called Bellevue. Sir Louis was a bachelor and retired diplomat who had been close to Philip’s parents and in their absence took on a mentoring role, somewhat similar to the relationship that Philip had enjoyed with Lord Esher during the war. Louis had sold his own home at Otham in Kent to move to Lympne, an act that Philip Tilden referred