Part 1

THE ART OF BUILDING A HOME.

MANCHESTER: Chorlton & Knowles, Mayfield Press.

1901.

THE ART OF BUILDING A HOME.

A Collection of Lectures and Illustrations by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.

Longmans, Green & Co., 39, Paternoster Row, London, New York, & Bombay, 1901.

PREFACE.

Some time ago I published a reprint of two of my articles with illustrations which had appeared in “The Building News.”

This little publication, though long out of print, being still constantly asked for; and the need of something to take its place being felt by us; the question of re-issuing it arose. Instead of doing this, however, it seemed better, as being a later and fuller expression, to collect two or three of the lectures which my partner and I had from time to time written for various audiences; and to add by way of illustration some of the sketches and photographs we had by us.

So came into existence this book in its present form.

BARRY PARKER, The Quadrant, Buxton, 1901.

CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK. Page.

Introduction I-VI

I. Of the Smaller Middle Class House 1 Barry Parker.

II. Of the Dignity of All True Art 21 Barry Parker.

III. Of our Education in Art 37 Barry Parker.

IV. Of Art and Simplicity 55 Raymond Unwin.

V. Of Furniture 69 Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.

VI. Of Building and Natural Beauty 83 Raymond Unwin.

VII. Of Co-operation in Building 91 Raymond Unwin.

VIII. Of the Art of Designing Small Houses and Cottages 109 Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.

List of Plates and Plates at the end. 136

INTRODUCTION.

The way we run in ruts is wonderful: our inability to find out the right principles upon which to set to work to accomplish what we take in hand, or to go to the bottom of things, is simply astonishing: while the resignation with which we accept the Recognised and Usual as the Right and Inevitable is really beautiful.

In nothing is this tendency more noticeable than in the art of house-building. We begin by considering what, in the way of a house, our neighbours have; what they would expect us to have; what is customary in the rank of life to which we belong; anything, in fact, but what are our actual needs. About the last thing we do is to make our home take just that form which will, in the most straightforward manner, meet our requirements.

It is too often evident that people, instead of being assisted, and their lives added to, by the houses they occupy, are but living as well as may be in spite of them. The house, planned largely to meet supposed wants which never occur, and sacrificed to convention and custom, neither satisfies the real needs of its occupants nor expresses in any way their individuality.

The planning having been dictated by convention, all the details are worked out under the same influence. To each house is applied a certain amount of meaningless mechanical and superficial ornamentation according to some recognised standard. No use whatever is made of the decorative properties inherent in the construction and in the details necessary to the building. These are put as far as possible out of sight. For example, latches and locks are all let into the doors leaving visible the knob only. The hinges are hidden in the rebate of the door frame, while the real door frame, that which does the work, is covered up with the strip of flimsy moulded board styled the architrave. All constructional features, wherever possible, are smeared over with a coat of plaster to bring them up to the same dead level of flat monotony, leaving a clear field for the erection of the customary abominations in the form of cornices, imitation beams where no beams are wanted, & plaster brackets which could support, and do support, nothing. Even with the fire the chief aim seems to be to acknowledge as few of its properties and characteristics as possible; it is buried as deep in the wall, and as far out of sight and out of the way as may be; it is smothered up with as much uncongenial and inappropriate “enrichment” as can be crowded round it; and, to add the final touch of senseless incongruity, some form of that massive and _apparently_ very constructional and essential thing we call a mantelpiece is erected, in wood, stone, or marble, towering it may be even to the ceiling. If we were not so accustomed to it, great would be our astonishment to find that this most prominent feature has really no function whatever, beyond giving cause for a lot of other things as useful and beautiful as itself, which exist only that they may be put upon it, “to decorate it.”

Could we but have the right thing put in the right place and left alone, each object having some vital reason for being where it is, and obviously revealing its function; could we but have that form given to everything which would best enable it to answer the real purpose for which it exists; our houses would become places of real interest.

The essence and life of design lies in finding that form for anything which will, with the maximum of convenience and beauty, fit it for the particular functions it has to perform, and adapt it to the special circumstances in which it must be placed. Perhaps the most fruitful source whence charm of design arises in anything, is the grace with which it serves its purpose and conforms to its surroundings. How many of the beautiful features of the work of past ages, which we now arbitrarily reproduce and copy, arose out of the skilful and graceful way in which some old artist-craftsman, or chief mason, got over a difficulty! If, instead of copying these features when and where the cause for them does not exist, we would rather emulate the spirit in which they were produced, there would be more hope of again seeing life and vigour in our architecture and design.

When the architect leaves the house, the subservience to convention is not over. After him follow the decorator and the furnisher, who try to overcome the lifelessness and vapidity by covering all surfaces with fugitive decorations and incongruous patterns, and filling the rooms with flimsy stereotyped furniture and nick-nacks. To these the mistress of the house will be incessantly adding, from an instinctive feeling of the incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness of the whole. Incidentally we see here one reason why the influence of the architect should not stop at the completion of the four walls, but should extend to the last detail of the furnished house. When his responsibility ceases with the erection of the shell, it is natural that he should look very little beyond this. There is no inducement for him to work out any definite scheme for a finished room, for he knows that if he had any aim the decorator and furnisher would certainly miss it and would fail to _complete_ his creation. If, when designing a house, the architect were bearing in mind the effect each room would have when finished and furnished, his conceptions would be influenced from the very beginning, and his attitude towards the work would tend to undergo an entire change. At present he but too readily accepts the popular idea of art as a thing quite apart from life, a sort of trimming to be added if funds allow.

It is this prevalent conception of beauty as a sweetmeat, something rather nice which may be taken or left according to inclination after the solid meal has been secured, which largely causes the lack of comeliness we find in our houses. Before this idea can be dispelled & we can appreciate either the place which art should hold in our lives or the importance of rightly educating the appreciation of it, we must realise that beauty is part of the necessary food of any life worth the name; that art, which is the expression of beauty as conceived and created by man, is primarily concerned with the making of the useful garments of life beautiful, not with the trimming of them; and that, moreover, in its higher branches art is the medium through which the most subtle ideas are conveyed from man to man.

Understanding something of the true meaning of art, we may set about realising it, at least in the homes which are so much within our control. Let us have in our houses, rooms where there shall be space to carry on the business of life freely and with pleasure, with furniture made for use; rooms where a drop of water spilled is not fatal; where the life of a child is not made a burden to it by unnecessary restraint; plain, simple, and ungarnished if necessary, but honest. Let us have such ornament as we do have really beautiful and wrought by hand, carving, wrought metal, embroidery, painting, something which it has given pleasure to the producer to create, and which shows this in every line--the only possible work of art. Let us call in the artist, bid him leave his easel pictures, and paint on our walls and over the chimney corner landscapes and scenes which shall bring light and life into the room; which shall speak of nature, purity, and truth; shall become part of the room, of the walls on which they are painted, and of the lives of us who live beside them; paintings which our children shall grow up to love, and always connect with scenes of home with that vividness of a memory from childhood which no time can efface. Then, if necessary, let the rest of the walls go untouched in all the rich variety of colour and tone, of light and shade, of the naked brickwork. Let the floor go uncarpeted, and the wood unpainted, that we may have time to think, and money with which to educate our children to think also. Let us have rooms which once decorated are always decorated, rooms fit to be homes in the fullest poetry of the name; in which no artificiality need momentarily force us to feel shame for things of which we know there is nothing to be ashamed: rooms which can form backgrounds, fitting and dignified, at the time and in our memories, for all those little scenes, those acts of kindness and small duties, as well as the scenes of deep emotion and trial, which make up the drama of our lives at home.

B. P. R. U.

THE SMALLER MIDDLE CLASS HOUSE.

A lecture delivered before an audience of architects in 1895.

In the class of house with which we are to deal to-night, there are so many directions in which improvement is needed, that it will only be possible for me, in the space of one lecture, to refer to a few of them, and to those specially which will illustrate most suggestively the main principles for which I contend: suggestively, in the hope that some present will do me the honour of giving further thought to what I shall touch upon, than is possible to them during the length of time assigned to me this evening.

The influences which our common every-day surroundings have upon our characters, our conceptions, our habits of thought and conduct, are often very much underrated; we do not realise the power they have of either aiding or hindering the development in us of the best or worst of which we are capable.

Of the capacity the mere contour of a moulding has to bear the impression of refinement or vulgarity, we, as architects, are fully aware; but, I think, may not quite as fully realise the harmful influence of imperfect and unspontaneous drawing, or ill-conception in pattern design, or ill-assorted combinations of colour.

The thing of first consideration in designing a house is convenience, workability. The plan is that which should be first thought of; so, in our small middle class house, I will try to suggest one or two of the improvements that seem to be most wanted in planning.

First of all, for the sake of any who may be here who are not architects, I will just point out what is the most comfortable form of room for a sitting room with respect to the relative positions of the door, windows, and fire. If your room must, of necessity, be square or oblong (which should be the case as seldom as possible), the form most conducive to comfort, is of course this: diagram 1. The second best arrangement, (when this cannot be got) is to have the door and fire both on the long wall, diagram 2. When the door is on the opposite wall to the fire, you never feel to be able to get out of the draught of it; and of course this kind of thing, diagram 3, is too palpably bad to need that anything should be said regarding it.

One of the first defects we notice in the plans of houses of the class we are speaking of, as usually laid down, is that there are too many rooms & all therefore necessarily too small. In the larger middle class house there are generally drawing room, dining room, library, kitchens, and offices, all tolerably good rooms. Now, when a smaller house is wanted, the general custom seems to be, to put exactly the same number of rooms, only reducing all in size. Would it not be far better to reduce the number of rooms, keeping such rooms as we do retain, large enough to be healthy, comfortable, and habitable?

Are not many of the houses we know only too well, most distressing in this respect, divided up, as they are, into a number of small compartments, we cannot call them rooms, all far too small to be healthy; too small to be really fit for human habitation. And what is gained by this cramping? Only that there shall be one or more of these compartments practically useless. In far the greater number of these houses the third room is never used, or used merely because it happens to be there, and its chief end seems to be to provide a place for the women of the household to spend any spare time they may have, cleaning down, dusting &c.

Now many people have a feeling that there is a certain cosiness in a small room entirely unattainable in a large one; this is a mistake altogether; quite the reverse has been my experience, which is that such a sense of cosiness as can be got in the recesses of a large room, can never be attained in a small one, be it no larger than a sentry box. But if your big room is to be comfortable it _must_ have recesses. There is a great charm in a room broken up in plan, where that slight feeling of mystery is given to it which arises when you cannot see the whole room from any one point in which you are likely to sit; when there is always something _round the corner_.

And what is made of the hall? Generally one of two things; either it is a passage with a kind of step-ladder for a staircase and a hat stand in it, with not room enough for you to hold the door and let a friend out; or it is a great bare cold comfortless waste space, in the centre of the house: instead of being, as it might, the most comfortable and homely room, the centre of the common life of the household.

Of course a hall of this kind needs some care in planning. In the first place, the staircase must occupy exactly that position in which it can be made an ornament and a pleasing feature in the room, all of which it is quite capable of being, and a position in which it does not detract from the cosiness, or give any unpleasant feeling of draughtiness, or too great openness. In the second place, the doors necessarily opening into a hall must be carefully so grouped that the parts of the room in which anyone would sit, shall be out of the draught of them as far as possible.

Any house is cold all through the winter months unless a fire of some kind is kept burning in the hall; many people, therefore, find it necessary to have a stove or heating apparatus; and, in most houses, it is thought necessary to have two other fires burning, one in the living room, and one in some other room that there may be somewhere to show visitors. Now when the hall is also a sitting room, with a fire in it, we get, for the trouble and expense of two fires, all the advantages ordinarily attaching to three.

I must now pass on to Decoration and Furniture. The best test of the artistic merits or demerits of a room _as a whole_, is the impression it makes, on one’s entering for the first time. We can get accustomed to anything, and it is from this fact, taken in conjunction with what we have already noted, of the power as an influence for advancement or degradation of beautiful or unbeautiful surroundings, that the importance of our subject to-night is partly drawn. And what _should_ be our feeling, on entering a room? Simply this: How exquisitely comfortable! For _the first essential in the form and design of any decorative object_, (_and everything in a room should be a decorative object_), _is reposefulness_. I feel herein to be guilty of giving utterance to a truism, and I should hardly dare to state so obvious a fact, were it not that I see this first principle so almost universally violated; for, if this test of reposefulness is _the_ test, the average farm house kitchen has an artistic value far beyond that of ninety-nine out of every hundred drawing rooms in the kingdom; and I will endeavour to show why.

The first fault in our rooms which contributes to this result is _over decoration_. This is an almost universal failing. Everything has a pattern on it and almost every pattern is mechanically produced, run out by the yard, and cut off just where it happens to be when the time comes for it to finish. No pattern bears any relation to any other pattern, and the whole effect is fidgety, fussy, and painful to a degree. Nothing is let alone, but every surface must needs be worried and tortured into some unwholesome form of altogether soul-less ornament. We cannot even find rest for our weary eyes on the ceiling, for tortuous intricacies of design meet them there also.

The second fault I wish to refer to, is that all this ornament is made to shout, everything is clamouring for notice. It would not be in place for me to say much here about those rooms in which any one element of decoration is in such flagrantly bad taste as to be noticed, immediately on entering, with a sort of start and feeling of “Oh! wall-paper,” or “Oh! carpet,” or whatever it may happen to be. (A designer will often aim at this for the sake of the advertisement and at the sacrifice of his artistic principles). But even when this extreme is not reached, everything seems trying within certain limits to assert itself, to attract attention.

Now any ornament you notice when you do not look for it, or perhaps I might better say, when you do not wish to think of it, is necessarily in bad taste. The degree of assertiveness admissible in a decorative object depends upon the degree of its naturalisation or conventionalisation, or, to put it another way, on the degree in which it is fine or mechanical. And though we cannot pretend to regulate by rules of this kind, pictures which are direct mirrors as far as possible of real things, yet, in so far as they are mural decorations, they come under this law.

Mr. Ruskin’s wall, painted to look like a vinery, would admit of much more forcible treatment, being entirely painted by hand and as true to nature as possible, than would a wall with a _printed_ vine pattern on it in which there necessarily was repetition. And natural flowers painted may fittingly be treated much more forcibly than would be admissible in a purely conventional design, because natural flowers, hills, & trees, cannot become assertive enough to influence one disquietingly. Therefore the more nearly approaching to nature, the more assertive may be our ornament, or rather the less assertive it _will_ be from this very reason, and therefore may be the more _forcible_ in treatment. So we can stand, in a conventional pattern design, a degree of contrast in tones, which we could not tolerate in flat masses of colour.

One of the chief underlying causes of this failing of fussiness we have noted, is, that a room is scarcely ever designed _as a whole_, never enough thought of as a whole. The designer of each individual thing, knowing nothing of the form or character which anything else in the room was going to take, thought only of his own design, & worked enough interest into it to make it all-sufficient in itself; and the consequence, when his design gets put into a room in conjunction with a lot of other things, all designed in just the same spirit, is, that restlessness we have been deploring.

A room is a place in which to think of other things besides those relating exclusively to the room itself, and so much incident and interest should not be worked into it as to distractingly affect the pursuance of these thoughts & occupations. I say again, any ornament which you notice when you do not wish to is necessarily in bad taste.

When choosing anything, a wall paper for instance, we forget that we are, while so doing, devoting all our thought and attention to the design we are considering; and that, though pleasing under these circumstances, it may not be equally so to have by us when we wish to think of other things, or in the position for which we intend it. Now no flat mechanical ornament, designed to cover a large space, should ever be so designed that you are able easily to trace the pattern at the other side of the room. Please do not understand from this that it should be _small_ in design; far from it; things small in design are, almost necessarily, finikin and therefore unreposeful; but being quiet and retiring in colour and contrast of tones, whether large or small, let it reveal, when you come to have _leisure_ to examine it, vigorous broad and direct treatment, good loving thoughtful drawing, real artistic conception, and perception of beauty in form and line.

How seldom we get these qualities: how laboured and unspontaneous most patterns are! Into what unwholesome forms the ornament is tortured, how the one aim seems to be to make the design as restless and fussy as possible! A sort of feeling pervades the whole, that the designer could not let the thing alone.

I think we must not now go far into the faults in actual draughtsmanship most common in our designs. But one thing is very striking: our designers, almost without exception, seem to be out of their depth directly anything in the way of foreshortening is required of them; this cannot but lead us to the conclusion, that drawing from Nature does not form a sufficiently important part of their training. In fact I have myself known several men, engaged entirely in drawing ornament, who never drew a bud or twig from Nature in their lives. However this may be, the fact remains that very few of our designers seem able to draw a leaf turning over with any truth and accuracy.

Another cause of failure in our rooms is _the dread of repeating ourselves_. With my wish that a more wholesome feeling in this may spring up among all engaged in artistic work, I am perhaps more anxious to have your sympathy than with anything which has gone before. Let us then _do nothing different from what we have done before, until we feel it to be better than what we have done before_.