An Arts and Crafts architect’s book of his own houses and his principles: the hall restored as the house’s main room, with its fire and its inglenook, no longer a passage and its stair enclosed or banished from it; rooms opening into one another; and the garden planned with the house.
Baillie Scott (1865–1945) built houses in the Isle of Man, the Lake District (Blackwell, 1898–1900) and the south of England, and the rooms he decorated for the Grand Duke of Hesse at Darmstadt (1897–98) made his name in Germany, where his houses were widely published and admired by Hermann Muthesius.
He wished to bring back the hall of the old English house as the room in which the household lived: large and comfortable, with a great fireplace and a seat beside it and the other rooms opening off it, rather than the narrow passage of the Victorian house. It must no longer be a passage, he wrote, and its staircase must be enclosed or banished from it; it might well be the dining room too. He preferred the casement to the sash in the country, and deplored the machine-made half-timbered villa.
The book, part by part
I The hall and the living rooms
The hall as the main living room, its fire and its inglenook; the dining room and the drawing room opening from it; built-in seats and cupboards.
Rules: The hall to live in