Arts and Crafts

Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.

Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.

Make the roof visible, and bring its eaves down low enough, and far enough out, that the building reads as a shelter from the street and the garden.

Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.

Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.

Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.

Turn the house to the sun rather than to the street: the living rooms on the sunny side, lit from more than one direction, the kitchen and stores on the cool side, and the fewer and larger rooms the better.

Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.

Do without the parlour kept for show, and reduce the entrance hall to a small vestibule or a nook of the living room: let the front door open, through it, into a living room built round a large fireplace, open widely into the dining room, with seats, bookcases and cupboards built into its walls.

Build a deep porch, eight or nine feet, usually recessed under the main roof, on sturdy posts or piers, big enough to sit and eat in: in summer it is the living room of the house.

Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.

On flat land, keep the house low and let its lines run parallel to the ground: low-pitched hipped roofs with deep overhangs, continuous sills and copings, bands of windows, and terraces extending into the garden.

roof pitch ≈ 15°–25° · eaves projecting 1.5–3 m

Plan the house around a great fireplace at its heart, and let the wings of the plan extend from it in a cross or a pinwheel.

Let each material reveal its own character (the grain of wood, the stratification of stone, the plasticity of concrete) and design each part in the way its material wants to be used.

Commit no architectural deceit: do not suggest a structure other than the real one, do not paint or carve one material to look like another, and do not pass off cast or machine-made ornament as handwork.

To roof a wide span, join each pair of rafters to a tie beam at their feet so that the three form a triangle that cannot spread; hang the tie beam from the apex by a king post, or by two queen posts on larger spans.

Arrange a building for its uses first and let its outline follow: gables, bays, chimneys and towers go where the rooms behind need them. Never contrive irregularity for effect, and never force a symmetrical front on an unsymmetrical plan.

Build a town of limited size (about 32,000 people on 1,000 acres) in the middle of an estate of 6,000 acres owned by the community, and keep the surrounding 5,000 acres as a permanent agricultural belt; when the town is full, found another beyond it.

town 1,000 acres + belt 5,000 acres; 30,000 in the town + 2,000 on the land

Plan the town as rings round a central garden and cut it into six wards by six boulevards; put the great public buildings round the garden, a park beyond them, houses in the middle rings, and factories and warehouses on the outer ring beside a circular railway.

Enclose the central park with a wide glass arcade, the “Crystal Palace”, to hold the shops and serve as a winter garden, so that everyone can shop and walk under cover within a few hundred yards of home.

Run a ring avenue about 420 feet wide through the middle of the residential rings as a continuous park, and set in it the schools, with their playgrounds, and sites for churches of every denomination.

Build no more than about twelve houses to the acre, in groups rather than endless rows, each with a front garden and a long back garden; the saving on roads pays for the extra land.

≈ 12 houses per net acre (≈ 30 per hectare), against 40 or more in by-law streets