Owletts is a fine example of a seventeenth-century red brick, Kentish yeoman’s house, built during the reign of Charles II. It was the home of the architect of the Empire, Lutyens’s pupil, Sir Herbert Baker (1862–1946), whose family had owned the property since 1794.
He gave it to the National Trust in 1938 and it was leased, until recently, to his granddaughter. The small collection of pictures at Owletts is indigenous, predominated mostly by landscape views and a few nineteenth-century family portraits, which sadly do not include a likeness of Sir Herbert Baker himself.