III. The Hall

The room we came into was indeed the house, for there was nothing but it on the ground floor, but a stair in the corner went up to the chamber or loft above.

It was much like the room at the Rose, but bigger; the cupboard better wrought, and with more vessels on it, and handsomer. Also the walls, instead of being panelled, were hung with a coarse loosely-woven stuff of green worsted, with birds and trees woven into it.

There were flowers in plenty stuck about the room, mostly of the yellow blossoming flag or flower-de-luce, of which I had seen plenty in all the ditches, but in the window near the door was a pot full of those same white poppies I had seen when I first woke up; and the table was all set forth with meat and drink, a big salt-cellar of pewter in the middle, covered with a white cloth.

“A Dream of John Ball.” William Morris.

Before considering the hall in the modern house it is necessary to return to the most primitive form of plan, when the house itself was the hall and served for every function of the domestic life. It was there the family cooked and ate their food. It was there they talked. And when night came it was on its rush-strewn floor that they slept.

Gradually, however, as civilisation advanced, special cells were developed from this unicellular type of plan, each adapted for its special function. And so the original simple organism became complex, and, as each cell became differentiated, the hall lost one by one its functions. There were parlours for talking, bedrooms for sleeping, dining-room for eating, drawing-room for withdrawing; and thus the hall itself became a superfluous and unnecessary adjunct—its occupation gone.

And so, like the tail of the crab, it began to dwindle, or, at most, it persisted like the buttons on the back of a coat, as a useless part of the plan, merely serving to connect the other portions of the house.

And thus we find this atrophied form of the hall in the shape of the narrow lobby with the staircase in it, which even in the smallest villa is still dignified by the ancient title. In modern times the revolt against the sordid ugliness of the Victorian house led those who aimed at re-creating beauty in domestic surroundings to turn with an enthusiasm which was almost passionate to the study of the earlier types of plan, where the hall played such an important part. And so, amidst other features and details of the past, the hall became again a somewhat notable feature in the plan, and was considered almost an essential adjunct to the artistic house.

In the large house, where economic conditions of planning may give way to the fancy of the individual, this revival of the hall may perhaps be justified, and a sitting-room may well be sacrificed for the sake of a fine focus to the plan; but in the smaller houses, where every inch of space must be made the most of, such a hall was a somewhat expensive luxury, though, inasmuch as it is the mark of the modern mind to be incapable of conceiving beauty except apart from usefulness, the hall in this connection helped to give what is considered “artistic character” to a house. It was at least useless enough for that! In nearly all cases the hall so revived was essentially a passage room for the family, the servants and the visitors, and so whatever functions it might have performed as an additional sitting-room were lost. With its numerous doors, its open staircase and gallery, it was draughty and comfortless. And yet this revival of the hall, in spite of its obvious drawbacks and its practical uselessness, seemed to point to some dissatisfaction with the type of plan blindly evolved under economic conditions. In such an evolution it is not necessarily the fittest which survives, but only the fittest which man is capable of achieving step by step in an empirical way. It has been shown how by such a process, the house from a single room became gradually subdivided into a number of boxes connected by the dwarfed remains of the original room which now fulfilled the only function left to it and became a passage merely.

It has also been shown how such a house lacks coherence and consistency, and in the smaller houses how it leads to cramped conditions. Advance in planning no longer takes the form of a blind evolution; for the modern architect, with his essentially modern historical sense, looks back on the houses of the past, and consciously studies the plan of the modern house so that it shall be adapted for the real needs of its occupants.

And his first step is to revive the hall, but to revive it with a difference. It is to be a room where the family can meet together—a general gathering-place with its large fireplace and ample floor space. It must no longer be a passage, and the staircase must either be enclosed or banished from it altogether. Whether it is called hall, houseplace, or living room, some such apartment is a necessary feature as a focus to the plan of the house.

Of all the functions which such a room originally possessed the last to go was the function of feeding; and even when it became desirable for the ladies to retire to their withdrawing room, and privacy in sleeping apartments was felt to be essential, the hall still remained a dining hall, and as such it might well remain in the modern house, where the function of dining is still the central and typical feature of the domestic ritual; for home life, even if conducted on the most approved principles of plain living and high thinking, is still to a large extent, it must be confessed, a question of meals. The family may or may not meet to talk or to study, but it is almost universally the custom to meet to eat. And so, to put the matter in another way, the central room may be obtained by an enlargement of the dining-room in the ordinary house and by a corresponding reduction in the other apartments.

But this reduction in some cases will make these secondary rooms somewhat small if they are entirely self-contained, and so it is further suggested that those which do not demand a strict division from the hall should be divided from it by folding or sliding doors, or even by curtains, so that they share in its spaciousness and appear rather as recesses than rooms claiming a separate individuality. If it is considered desirable that dining should not be the central function of the hall, the dining-room may form a recess which will be described later on. The process, in short, involves an examination of the evolution of the house, and consists in substituting a partial for a complete differentiation from the hall in cases where the functions of cells make it possible and desirable.

It is felt that to merely reduce the various special rooms to their minimum size and then to add a hall or living-room is not only expensive in that it adds to the already large number of special rooms yet another room, but that this room, so added, being deprived of all its functions by the special rooms, hardly justifies its existence as a dominant note in the plan. The term living-room for such an apartment is misleading; for life in the home is composed of so many functions, and when these are all provided for by separate compartments the hall or living-room must necessarily dwindle away. By retaining, therefore, those original functions of the hall which do not demand a complete isolation from it, either in the hall itself or where means allow in the form of recesses, the hall regains its ancient place and constitutes to a great extent the house.

It is only in the large house, indeed, that the spacious hall may still justify itself, although it still remains a passage. Here, as in the hotel, it constitutes an expansion of the route plan of the house, where one may observe, as it were, the full current of the household life. It bears much the same relation to the private rooms as the busy market does to the homes of the people who meet there.