Newton was the son of an estate manager of Bickley, Kent. He was educated at Uppingham School. He married, in 1881, Antoinette Johanna Hoyack, of Rotterdam, and had three sons. He was resident again at Bickley in 1883 and built his own house at Bird in Hand Lane, Bickley in 1884. In the next 20 years he built many houses in the Bickley and Chislehurst area – no two being identical.
He served his apprenticeship in the office of Richard Norman Shaw from 1873 to 1876, remaining for a further three years as an assistant before commencing private practice on his own account in London in February 1880. He was briefly in partnership with William West Neve around 1882. In 1884, he was a founder member of the Art Workers Guild. He developed a career designing one-off houses largely in Bromley and Bickley and later moving into 'high-profile' country home commissions across England.
"He is one of the busiest architects in England and therefore represents the good principles of current thinking about the house in perhaps its most accessible form..." Hermann MuthesiusThe English House 1904.
"His eminence as an architect of unexcelled skill in a class of work that constitutes England's chief or sole claim to supremacy – the capture and apt embodiment of the very spirit of the home..." Obituary, Architects' Journal; 1 February 1922, p187.
In the 1890s he acted as consulting architect to William Willett. Newton was President of RIBA 1914–1917. In 1918 he received the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. In 1919, he was elected a Royal Academician, and was appointed a CBE in 1920. His last piece of
work was a war memorial at his former school at Uppingham.
Writing
He published Sketches for Country Residences (1882), A Book of Houses (1890 ), and A Book of Country Houses (1903).
“..a small house is in many ways more difficult to design than a large one, for while every part must be minutely schemed, nothing should be cramped or mean looking, the whole house should be conceived broadly and simply, and with an air of repose, the stamp of home." A Book of Houses
His son, William Godfrey Newton, (1885–1949), published The Work of Ernest Newton R.A. (1925).
