I. Houses as They Are and as They Might Be

The popular conception of the artistic house is that it is a fancy dwelling in which the claims of Art override practical requirements. It is often held to represent indulgence in the aesthetic faculties which can only be obtained at the expense of material comforts. Like those early prints which were sold at “a penny plain and tuppence coloured,” houses are broadly divisible, it may be supposed, into two classes—the plain and every-day house, unattractive and practically useful, which may be obtained for a penny or its equivalent; and the Art house, which is only for those who can afford the luxuries of life, and who, living amidst the coloured glories of the tuppenny house, cheerfully accept these beauties in exchange for mere material advantages, or as a costly addition to these.

That such a conception is not without a basis in facts must be admitted, and the demand for spurious Art, which the little knowledge of modern Art education so readily inculcates, is met on all sides by those who cater to the wants and the whims of the public.

The house which, for want of a better word, we must continue to differentiate from the ordinary house as “artistic,” bases its claims not on its frillings and on its adornments, but on the very essence of its structure. The claims of common-sense are paramount in its plan, and its apartments are arranged to secure comfortable habitation for its inmates, and to reduce labour in service or cleaning to a minimum. No dusty carpets cover its floors. Its windows are not cloaked with elaborate curtains and blinds. Its apartments are not crowded with useless and unlovely furniture. It aims at fulfilling no popular conception of what a house should be, follows no fashion, and apes not its neighbour mansion. If restricted resources necessitate that it should be small, there is yet no sense of cramped accommodation, because restrictions have been met by frank concessions. It is a roomy and commodious cottage, not a mansion in miniature, while under more generous conditions it attains the true dignity of the country house, and does not ape the cottage.

In its construction the exposure of every feature of the building is not necessarily involved, and though the structure indeed largely contributes to the beauty of the house, it is often obscured to meet practical requirements, or to supply surfaces for plain spaces of pure colour or thoughtfully conceived decoration. The furniture, too, reveals little trace of conscious effort. It does not pose or smirk or in any way insist on our attention to its artistic perfections, but is modest and serviceable, and rests its chief claim for existence on the possession of those qualities. It is fitted for its purpose, and is not necessarily made of expensive or highly-finished materials. In such a realisation of a house, that same reasonableness which is claimed as a basis of the whole fabric forbids the attempt to achieve many of the beauties which belonged to the houses of the past. Old work is, indeed, carefully studied, and the principles which governed it followed. Old models are often taken for the features of the house and its furniture, but these are necessarily changed and modified to meet modern conditions and limitations. The Art of the people which flourished in the past is now extinct, and so we can no longer enrich our houses and furniture with carving and painting. The wit and fancy of the old workman which found such a field for its display in the woodwork of old houses is no longer available; and only those who can afford to employ the few surviving artist craftsmen, or those incapable of discerning the gulf fixed between the old work and the new, may dare to decorate their houses in this way. In the meantime, and until Art again revives, whitewash represents a temporary expedient which has much to recommend it, and “when in doubt, whitewash” might well be taken as a maxim to be followed in the decoration of the modern house.

Before proceeding to consider the possibilities of the house as it might be, it may be well to glance for a moment at the house as it is. Every one who has experienced the disappointments of a search for a dwelling will probably willingly concede that the average modern house is not remarkable for convenience or beauty, and under the conditions which govern its production it is not strange that this should be so.

The majority of small houses especially are designed and built by men who have no knowledge or skill in planning, and whose notions and habits ot thought are entirely commercial. The higher skill has been mainly employed on the larger houses, and the small ones have been consigned to the jerry-builder, who has built them as we see them, so that one is led almost to forget that a small house can be made both comfortable and comely, and that in its expression of modest homeliness and simplicity it may often put to shame the pretensions of its larger neighbours.

Not alone, however, it must be confessed, is the builder to blame for the demerits of the small house. It may be said that he is the wise man who builds houses for fools to live in, and too often the occupier of a small house is in love with its very defects. He admires the front elevation with its bay window and the leaded glazing in the front door, and hangs his pictures and arranges his furniture with a touching assurance that all this is as it should be, while his wife receives her friends in her little drawing-room with a rooted conviction as to its undoubted elegance. Or again, it would appear that the modern householder, like the hermit crab, is the outcome of a series of concessions, and has finally become adapted to a dwelling designed less with a view to his comfort than to the profit of its possessor. But still there is a section of householders who have no illusions as to the beauty of their dwellings, and who cannot reconcile themselves to their defects, and this class, it may be hoped, is a growing one.

There is yet, however, a further stumbling-block to be found in the blind, irrational following of tradition in house-planning. The modern cottage almost invariably strives to include within its restricted space the features of the mansion. So it misses the excellence within its easy reach in its futile attempt to ape its larger neighbours, and, like the dog in the fable, is left bereft of the substance while it grasps at the shadow. This method of house-building is still further encouraged by the commercial classification of houses in the market. There is the house with two reception-rooms, and next above it in the scale of excellence the house with three reception-rooms. A bay-window is a further asset; and so houses are valued, not in relation to the skill and thought displayed in their planning, but by the degree in which their interior has been subdivided into rectangular compartments, and again by the number of excrescences in the shape of bay windows, &c., which they possess.

Houses which might have been much more reasonably and economically built as a terrace are thus placed a yard or two apart in order that they may be described as detached; and the space in the plan, which might have been devoted to a much-needed pantry or added to the dining-room, is partitioned off to form the third sitting-room, which will raise the house a step in the house agent’s scale of excellence.

While urging that improvement in the plan of the modern house, and the small house especially, must chiefly consist in the converse of this commercial evolution, and that conventional ideas must be sacrificed to secure at least one room of reasonable size, I do not advocate the pushing this principle too far. In a neurotic age it will not be wise to try and emulate the simplicity of the earliest types of plan, where all the various functions of the domestic life were discharged in one apartment; and the desk for the student, the grand piano and the cooking-range are necessarily incompatible occupants of the most commodious “house place;” and when used simultaneously one may well imagine that the view from the open gallery, which overlooks and in overlooking destroys the privacy of the whole, would not be entirely harmonious. The whole problem of the modern house is thus necessarily an attempt to secure those opposing qualities of privacy and spaciousness, and the plans illustrated show various methods in which this has been more or less successfully achieved.

It must not, however, be too hastily assumed that a rational reform in the planning of houses will be readily welcomed by the occupants of the modern villa, for no subject is so surrounded by every kind of cant and illusion. Those who exclaim against the restrictions and inconveniences of the modern house would be the first to object to the sacrifice of its imaginary qualifications for the real comforts of life. The greater part of the inconvenience and discomfort of the modern house is due partly, it is true, to the ignorance of its builders, but mainly to the prejudices and conventional standard of its occupants. The small house is regarded not as a roomy cottage but as a mansion in miniature. Like the immortal Mrs. Wilfer, its occupants are anxious that we should believe that though they live in a small house, “male domestics are no rareties to them;” and so we find the modern house, with its tissue of pretentious absurdities and inconveniences, chiefly explained, inasmuch as it is the exponent of the ideals of its occupants, who have set the possession of that gorgeous male domestic as a sort of counsel of perfection, an impossible and long hoped-for ideal to which all must be sacrificed.

And so the drawing-room is made worthy of his presence by imitations of French furniture, and the dining-room is duly enriched with its appointed carved and fumigated oak. The shadow of the flunkey broods over the whole establishment.

The man who is sincere enough to see the unworthiness of such ideas, and who is wise enough to regard the small house as a large cottage rather than a restricted mansion, will demand planning and furniture on totally opposite principles to those usually followed. He has no wish to emulate his neighbours in the matter of fashionable furnishings and methods of life. He has a settled conviction that the simplest form of life is the worthiest and most reasonable, and that true progress lies not in multiplying and complicating the appointments of the house, but in reducing them to the lowest effective limit. He does not consider the house to be a place for the display of furniture and bric-a-brac, but primarily a home for human beings, planned for their comfort, convenience, and pleasure. He demands in the planning of his house, besides practical comforts, that kind of beauty which is inherent in the structure, which depends largely on proportion, and does not require furniture for effect. And so in the broad simple spaces of his roomy cottage he disposes his few belongings. He has no wish to reproduce the departed glories of any of the popular styles. These fantastic and histrionic revivals find no place in his home. He is content with simple and straightforward joiner work. Neither is he anxious to cover every square inch of his walls and ceilings with pattern, and he is quite unimpressed by the wares of the trade decorator, with his embossing and stamping and gilding. These things are familiar to him in the houses of his friends, in his club and his hotel, and at home he would have rest. Not that he has entirely abjured decoration in his home, but it must be for him not the seductive cleverness of the trade artist, but the best product of the heart and brain; something, too, individual and peculiar. In the meantime, whitewash will do well enough.

For the rest, he has an eye for detail, and as far as possible he tries to secure good and thoughtful design, not only in his house but in all its appointments, and so his knives and forks, his china and glass, all bear the impress of thought and feeling in design and manufacture. Nor does he stop here. The very simplicity and unpretentiousness of his surroundings are eloquent in suggestions for the ritual of his daily life, and just as he does not wish to imitate the mansion in his modest dwelling, so is he less willing to ape the habits of its occupants. When he asks a friend to dinner, he does not seek to impress his guests by the multitude of his courses or the magnificence of his plate. He may indeed be quietly proud of the homely beauty of his surroundings, but it is a pride which is based not on their costliness, not on their price in the market, but rather on such qualities as fitness for their uses and beauty of line, colour, or texture.

In the furnishing of his house he has been careful to exclude all but the absolutely essential. He does not buy a table because he thinks it will “look well” standing in a bay window, and then proceed to find some ornament which will “look well” standing on the table. He might as reasonably first buy a mouse-trap on aesthetic grounds, and then a supply of mice to enable it to fulfil its functions. He knows better than to occupy valuable space with unnecessary articles of furniture, and is not without experience, perhaps of that strange and dreadful tyranny which these mere inarticulate objects are capable of exercising over their so-called possessors, now become their slaves. But here he touches on the confines of a great cult, a religion whose votaries are to be found in almost every family. These household gods are enshrined in rooms willingly given up for their occupation and sacred to their worship. They have no use, they have no beauty even. They are gods, and it remains but to worship them, keep them clean and hidden from the vulgar gaze. From this idolatry the modern householder must be set free before it becomes possible to achieve domestic surroundings which are rational and beautiful.

In seeking for a basis for a plan the governing factor will necessarily be the requirements of the average family, and if the matter is considered carefully, it v/ill be found that these requirements represent a fairly constant quantity. It is important that the plan should be adjusted to meet these requirements, and that the accommodation provided should neither be too large or too small; for the large house is not always a thing to be desired. It necessarily involves not only expenditure in building, but also expense in maintenance, and so it is apt to become a costly incubus to its occupants. On the other hand, a house which is small and cramped is still less to be wished for, involving as it does a loss of privacy and much friction both physical and mental between its inmates. A house should be spacious enough to allow of its occupants to move easily about without getting into each other’s way or tumbling over the furniture, and compact enough to make it easily and economically cleaned and worked. More than this, the average family should not require, nor should it be contented with less, and while the house should contain all the best appliances for saving of labour it should also minister to the mind, and represent the striking of a nice balance between the utilitarian scientific ideal on the one hand and the aesthetic on the other. Whatever beauty it possesses should be based on sound and rational planning and construction. In its features it should not aim at realising the latest things in doors, fireplaces, or windows, but the simplest and most rational type of these, and its beauty will largely depend in the omission of much which is vulgar, unnecessary, and expensive in the ordinary house. In gloomy weather, it must provide an interior in which one will not find it irksome or unhealthy either for mind or body to be confined, and a haven which will go far to compensate for sunless days.

If, with a view to secure these good ends, the family unit is subjected to analysis it will be found to be capable of division into two factors, the family and the servants representing two alien communities to be sheltered under the family roof. No longer do the early conditions obtain which made it possible for these to co-mingle, and for the comfort and wellbeing of each it will be well that they should each have a certain degree of privacy. Again, the family itself is divisible into parents and children, and outside the family itself the claims of the visitor must be considered. It is, indeed, the claims of the visitor in the traditions of the mansion applied to the smaller house which has played such havoc with house planning, and which has led to the conception of the family rooms as reception-rooms, arranged primarily to impress the guest of the hour, and which has made the best sitting-room too fine for daily use, and has set apart the best bedroom as a spare room, perhaps hardly ever occupied.

The average house should not be a place primarily for the reception of visitors, but a dwelling for a family, and the only impression the unfortunate visitor will receive segregated amidst forbidding furniture in an unaired and obviously unused room will be mainly one of discomfort. The house should then be designed essentially for its occupants, and should consist mainly of one good sized apartment, with plenty of floor space and elbow room, and with only such furniture as may be actually required. This room or houseplace, with its ample fireplace and broad spaces of floor, may, perhaps, be carried up nearly twice the height of the other rooms, which may be low and small. If, however, a gallery is introduced, it should be provided with shutters to secure privacy and freedom from draughts. The dining-room may either be a small separate room, or it may consist of a recess arranged as shown in the plans illustrating these remarks, and described fully later on.

The other appendages to this central room, inasmuch as they are for the occupation of separate members of the family, may be reduced considerably in size. Those which demand an absolute privacy will be completely cut off from the house place, while others in which privacy is not so essential may be included in the central idea of the house, screened from the house place as required by sliding doors or curtains only.

There will thus be a ladies’ room or boudoir, which will also be used for the reception of those visitors who are not received in the house place itself, a room for the children, and a man’s room which may be devoted to the particular hobbies of the master of the house, and christened accordingly as a “den” or “study.” Many modifications of such a scheme may be made to meet limitations of cost; but the essential principle insisted on is that the smaller kind of house, instead of being subdivided to the greatest possible extent into tiny compartments, should at least contain one good-sized room, which, by such devices as sliding-doors, can be made on occasion still larger. The arguments advanced in favour of such a reform have designedly been entirely practical ones; but from the artistic point of view it may be urged that success in planning can only be achieved by a conception which has a focus. The house which merely consists of a series of separate compartments conveys to the imagination no definite coherent expression. To the family crowded into one of these rectangular cells, the house for the time being is limited by the walls of the room they are occupying, and the remaining rooms, some perhaps rarely inhabited, are each distinct and separate, bearing no relation to the whole scheme.

It is not alone necessary, however, that the apartments of the house should be well designed and arranged in due relation to their functions. It is lo important also that the routes of passage of the various members of the family units should be carefully studied and arranged without undue waste of space in passages. The hall or house-place, while forming the central idea of the plan, must not be a passage-room for servants or visitors. The servants should be able to reach all the other rooms and the front entrance without passing through it, and the room appointed for the reception of visitors who may not be on terms of intimacy which would warrant their reception in the house-place itself, should be reached from the front entrance without infringing on the privacy of the family. In some cases the children may have their special entrance from the garden and special staircase, and a separate staircase for the servants is often desirable. The extent to which this isolation of routes may be carried out in the plan depends greatly on the particular circumstances of each case. It must not be pressed too far, and in that judicial balance of advantages and disadvantages of which the plan is the outcome, it may often be to some extent deliberately ignored.

So far I have dwelt on the economical side of house-planning, mainly because it is in the house for the average family that reform is most urgently required. Where space is necessarily limited and precious, it is of great importance that it should be made the most of. The defects of the present house, it has been shown, are chiefly due to a blind and unreasoning adherence to obsolete traditions and to the abortive attempts to produce on a small scale the appointments and apartments of the mansion rather than to realise on a large scale the cottage plan. It has been urged that the number and arrangements of the subdivisions of the whole house space covered by the roof should be governed by actual requirements, which, in the case of the average family, represent a fairly constant quantity, and the house evolved on these principles should be at least approximately suited to actual uses, expanding into spaciousness where the members of the family meet together, and contracting to a minimum in rooms occupied by its individual members. In cases where the uses of such smaller apartments do not demand an absolute privacy, these may take the form of recesses in the central common room, and the application of these principles to the plan suggests at once the dining recess. In other cases, where the intermittent use of a room occurs for purposes which do not demand absolute isolation from the common room, sliding-doors or even curtains may be found sufficient to give the required privacy, while in such rooms as those devoted to the play of the children the work of the master of the house, a more complete isolation is demanded, in the one case to shut noise in and in the other to shut it out.

While it is probable such a conception of the house will not recommend itself to the followers of an irrational tradition, on the other hand the dawning spirit of a more rational era tends to a utilitarian ideal no less to be deplored. The house here represents a congeries of conveniences, and in its wholesale rejection of the beauties of the old world refuses to admit features and principles which belong to all the ages. It is the part of the modern architect to fall into neither extreme, but to study and weigh the qualities and defects of the old houses, and, having inwardly digested the lesson they have to teach, to use the knowledge gained in a rational way.

But if it is undesirable that the dweller in the small house should aim at a cheapened version of his richer neighbour’s abode and manner of living, it is still less the part of the man who is able to build and maintain a large house to imitate the cottage qualities, and achieve the cottage “with the double coach-house.”

The curious affectation which has led to the reproduction of the farmhouse kitchen, with dishes and domestic utensils displayed instead of vases and knicknacks in a household where such a room is a sort of artistic toy, is but an extreme example of many such conceits. The importation of milking-stools and spinning-wheels into our drawing-rooms are but other examples of the same tendency to bring the cottage into the mansion. One feels at once a sense of the incongruous in such affectations, just as one would in an assumed artlessness of manner in the mistress of such an establishment. And examples might be multiplied of a like inconsistency of varying degrees of affectation. One of the least to be condemned is possibly the building of a large house as a magnified cottage, a method for which precedents are not wanting in many modern examples of domestic architecture. In the old days, a large house was usually a dignified structure. It expressed a certain quiet stateliness of planning and furnishing, and in the old English manor house one found the straight vista of the carriage-drive leading to the square forecourt, with the front entrance of dignified aspect. Without vulgar ostentation the whole effect was one of quiet, homely dignity, not rejoicing in expense for the sake of expense, but for the sake of beauty and fitness.

The large house will be chiefly marked by the number of its specialised rooms, which, however, should still combine to form an ensemble focussed in its central hall. It will further be distinguished by the use of materials which are beyond the means of the occupant of the cottage, and by the introduction of ornament of real beauty in design and workmanship. It will admit of the realisation of decorative schemes, which still retain their quality as a background and setting to life.

Too often, the large house with its collections of furniture and ornaments degenerates into a private museum, of which its owner is merely the custodian, and which in many cases drive him to seek escape to more congenial surroundings, leaving his house unoccupied for the greater portion of the year. In such excursions he indulges further that vice of indiscriminating acquisitiveness which has already crowded his house with objects of Art. It becomes a show place exhibited on the appointed day to the hushed and admiring groups of tourists, who absorb with interest the parrot-like utterances ot its custodian.

Such a development of the house may have points in its favour when its treasures are of real worth and arranged and chosen with discretion. But at its best it is not a home in the true sense at all. Like the public museum, it represents a kind of workhouse of the Arts, where furniture and china made for every-day use, and claiming our admiration chiefly in their adaptability to definite functions in the domestic life, rest like able-bodied paupers on a bench in inglorious idleness.

The true place of Art is in the service of everyday life, and beautiful furniture should be found fulfilling its function in the home rather than crowded in the museum, where the worship of its beauties becomes a kind of dilettante cult.

In the days when beautiful things were made every day as a matter of course, there were no museums and no Art Galleries, and the whole art force of the nation was beneficially spent in the construction, adornment and furnishing of its buildings.

Instead, then, of founding a private museum, it may be urged that the man who builds a large house should resolve to achieve the highest degree of fitness and beauty in all its appointments, and in doing so he will be getting far nearer to the real qualities of the houses of the past than if he aims at a mere histrionic reproduction of the ancestral hall which gives him merely the outward semblances of a body from which the soul has fled beyond recall.

To consciously aim at achieving style “in design, either old or new, is to follow a Will of the Wisp. For the pursuit of style, like the pursuit of happiness, must necessarily lead to disappointment and failure. Both alike are essentially bye-products, and the quality of the bye-product is in direct ratio to the worthiness of the ideal pursued. One may liken style to a jewel in the hilt of a sword, which flashes brightly when the blade is drawn in a worthy cause, and to which the warrior absorbed with the matter in hand will give but slight attention. It is a quality of the flower of things” only to be gained by root culture, and he who aims at style is he who would paint the lily instead of watering it.

To produce a stately modern apartment, it is not necessary to disinter the Corinthian column, or to set the modern workman once more to carve that oft-repeated formula of acanthus leaves at the bidding of some blind pedant who has no eyes for the beauty of the flowers and trees which surround him. Such vain repetitions do but destroy our sense of the beauty of their originals.

It is well that the apartments of the mansion should be of stately and dignified aspect, but let it be a stateliness and dignity which is vital, local and modern, the new thought of a new age wrought with eagerness and care, instead of the trite and stale copyism of the forms of the past. It is not necessarily true, as many seem to imagine, that the only alternative of this copyism is a bizarre striving after originality and eccentricity of design, and which, posing as the “new art,” is justly condemned by the judicious. New work which is based on the study of the past, which is sane, reasonable and vital, will only be considered eccentric from the point of view of those whose thoughts revolve round obselescent centres. Apparent eccentricity is the necessary concomitant to every advance in thought, and new ideas revolve round a centre which is constantly moving forward. The impressions of the surrounding country reported by the vanguard must necessarily seem untrue to those in their rear, but gradually as these are pushed and hustled forward they reach the same standpoint and recognise the truth of the picture. Architecture as expressed in house building and adornment is like all human affairs, necessarily in a state of flux—to live is to advance; and so, while holding fast that which is good, let us still hope for that which is better, and not let our admiration for past glories blind us to the undreamed possibilities of the