Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, Marine & Lawn Greywalls began as a private holiday home at the turn of the 20th century. More than 120 years later, its distinctive architecture, celebrated gardens and intimate character remain remarkably intact.
In 1901, politician and sportsman Alfred Lyttelton commissioned Lutyens to create a holiday home on raised ground beside Muirfield. His brief was unusually precise: the house should stand “within a mashie niblick shot of the eighteenth green.”
Lutyens answered with a crescent-shaped country house of local sandstone, curved around a circular forecourt and looking towards the links and Firth of Forth.
Around the house, Lutyens created six acres of walled and formal gardens, moving from parterres and clipped hedges to views across the East Lothian countryside.
Family tradition attributes the planting to Gertrude Jekyll, Lutyens’ great collaborator, although no formal plans survive. If hers, Greywalls would be the pair’s only known collaborative work in Scotland. Today, the gardens are included on Historic Environment Scotland’s national inventory.
Greywalls changed hands in 1905, when Evelyn Forbes and William Dodge James made it their home. Lutyens returned to design three gate lodges, while Scottish architect Sir Robert Lorimer added the Nursery Wing in 1911.
The house soon became known for its guests, among them King Edward VII. One particularly enduring reminder of his stay remains: a room overlooking the garden still known as the King’s Loo.
Sir James Horlick purchased Greywalls in 1924, and his family used it as a summer home until the Second World War, when the house was requisitioned by the military.
Greywalls opened as a hotel in 1948. Successive generations of the Horlick and Weaver families would run it for the next 77 years, preserving the character of both house and gardens.
Greywalls’ relationship with Muirfield was part of its design from the beginning. The course is home to The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, founded in 1744, and has hosted The Open Championship 16 times.
The 18th green remains just beyond the garden wall — exactly where Lyttelton asked Lutyens to place it more than a century ago.
In 2025, Greywalls entered new ownership and joined Marine & Lawn after nearly a century in the same family.
Today, 24 bedrooms occupy the original house and lodges, while Lutyens’ architecture and the historic gardens remain at its heart. Beyond them, the view stretches across Muirfield towards the Firth of Forth — the setting around which Greywalls was designed in 1901.