The style today known as Arts and Crafts dominated the last years before the First World War, and in bowdlerized form, has remained an inspiration to domestic architects all through the between-the-wars semi-detached drabness into being a significant influence in the myriads of “closes” and “ways” of modern estate housing.
Its legacy is a very sad one, because it was a quintessentially beautiful, and supremely domestic style. As Peter Davey in the definitive new Phaidon book on Arts and Crafts Architecture says, these buildings are so attractive and so appealing to live in.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was not a coherent whole but is the modern label for many strands of aesthetic exploration that were a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Naturally, most of these experiments drew on historical paradigms as in the works of William Morris and his belief in a return to the mediaeval guilds.
But many people today see the American engineer-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as an Arts and Crafts protagonist.
In this design I take inspiration from the man whom I believe to be the finest exponent of the entire movement, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In particular, although this house has a primarily English “cottagey” feel, I attempted to experiment with something Lutyens achieved brilliantly in a house at Knebworth, the combination of a Classical facade with a cottage-style plan.
Still moving forwards in time, and yet not entirely, this design combines a Twentieth Century glass hall spanning two Eighteenth Century Classical pavilions.
The design was developed both with moderately large panes of glass and small ones, the smaller being more expensive – the whole project represents a very expensive construction – but more appealing.
Homage to White
This seems a reasonable place to acknowledge the extraordinary preponderance of white in modern interior design, and I give a selection of examples below. As an aficionado of Chrissie Rucker’s White Company, this is a look to which I’m not entirely averse, although my own preference has always been, and will remain, for brilliant Carravagian colour. These white interiors must either be a nightmare to keep clean or ideal to keep clean, depending on how you look at it.