Designing buildings helped Arthur Conan Doyle to cope with his wife’s ill health

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his creation of the eccentric detective, Sherlock Holmes. But he was also interested in architecture and worked on several projects throughout his life, from his home in Surrey to a golf course in Canada. Now, a building designed by Conan Doyle, the Lyndhurst Park Hotel in Hampshire, is under threat of demolition. The hotel’s east wing was designed from sketches provided by the author during a stay there in 1912.

In The Greek Interpreter (1893), Holmes tells Watson that he has “art” in his “blood” from a French relative. Conan Doyle too had art in his blood. After settling in London in the 1820s his Dublin-born and art-trained grandfather, John Doyle (1797-1868), became a famous political cartoonist. He even sketched Queen Victoria when she was a child.

Conan Doyle’s uncle, Richard “Dick” Doyle, was a fairy painter and provided the illustrations for the cover of Punch magazine. Another uncle, Henry, became the National Gallery of Ireland’s first director in 1869. Even Conan Doyle’s godfather, Michael Conan, from whom he acquired part of his surname, had trained in art.

His father, Charles, also had artistic talent and took up an architectural post in the Office of Works in Edinburgh as a designer and draughtsman. However, in contrast to his elder brothers’ success, Charles’s career was marred by alcoholism, leading to his committal to asylums.

Charles’s only lasting achievement was to design the statues of the fountain, commissioned by Queen Victoria, in the forecourt of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The deterioration in his health and his frequent inability to work created an unstable home for his wife, Conan Doyle and his siblings. Much of the rest of Conan Doyle’s life was dictated by a need for financial and domestic (and so architectural) security.

Building Undershaw

This need was underlined by the design and building of Undershaw in Hindhead in Surrey for his wife Louisa. Undershaw was a medical necessity as well as a home. In October 1893, Louisa was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then an incurable disease. Two months later, Conan Doyle had Holmes grapple with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in The Final Problem (1893). It marked the end of the detective – or so readers believed.

The Conan Doyle family spent the succeeding years travelling between Switzerland and Egypt to alleviate Lousia’s symptoms, until the novelist Grant Allen advised them to try the Surrey air.

Conan Doyle duly purchased a plot and drafted designs before hiring his friend, the architect Joseph Henry Ball. The pair had bonded over their shared interest in paranormal investigations.

The name of the house came from its setting under the trees (“shaw” is from the Anglo-Saxon meaning wood or copse). The 11-bedroomed house provided a comfortable interior for Louisa with special door handles fitted to aid her rheumatism, and featured stained-glass windows with the coats of arms of his family. The family moved into their new home in October 1897. Built by profits from the Holmes stories, Undershaw was a testament to Conan Doyle’s literary status and, poignantly, a refuge for a wife who could not be cured.

It was while living at Undershaw that Conan Doyle returned to Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901.

Described as a “block of a building” covered with ivy from which “a window or a coat of arms broke through” and with “twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes,” Baskerville Hall is a home under threat. The Baskervilles live under the shadow of a curse, seemingly haunted by a spectral hound. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead at the edge of the moor near the giant footprint of a hound, it seems that the curse has struck again.

Architecture in Sherlock Holmes

In many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective fixes the problems in the home by investigating its architecture.

In The Speckled Band (1892) the crumbling country pile of Stoke Moran reflects the decay of its owner, Doctor Grimesby Roylott. Roylott tricks his stepdaughter, Helen Stoner (her surname suggestive of both abuse and incarceration), into occupying the room where her sister died on the pretext that building work on the house requires the move. When Holmes investigates the bedroom, he discovers a vent which adjoins Roylott’s room, through which Roylott sends a deadly snake, Julia’s killer. Roylott wants the sisters’ inheritances to shore up his home.

The story marking Holmes’s return from the Reichenbach Falls in 1903 is called The Empty House. Here Holmes and Watson hide in an unoccupied house directly opposite 221B Baker Street to catch a murderer intent on shooting Holmes.

The building of 221B Baker Street is perhaps Conan Doyle’s finest piece of literary architecture. The house, which did not exist in Conan Doyle’s time, functions as both Holmes and Watson’s lodgings and their detective agency. A Baker Street property modelled to recreate the stories’ conception of 221B was established in 1990 as a museum. There, visitors can believe that Holmes and Watson really existed because Conan Doyle “built” them so well.

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Catherine Wynne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.