The English house at the turn of the twentieth century: lighter, simpler and more open than the Victorian, planned round a living hall and turned to the sun, its fronts of roughcast and tile-hanging under long roofs, in the suburbs and garden cities as much as the country.
The Edwardian house took the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and gave them to the middle class. Architects such as M. H. Baillie Scott, C. F. A. Voysey and the young Edwin Lutyens, and the partners Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, built houses that were smaller, plainer and freer in plan than the Victorian ones, and they wrote about them. Their books argued for the house as a single home rather than a set of separate rooms for separate purposes.
The centre of that home was the living hall: a large room where the family gathered round a fire, often in an inglenook, from which the other rooms opened. Baillie Scott would have its stair enclosed or banished from it, so that it was no longer a passage; Parker and Unwin let the stair stay, placed so that its traffic did not cross the seats by the fire. Parker and Unwin wanted every principal room to have the sun, and turned their houses to it whatever the line of the road: the living room south and south-west, the kitchen north-east or east, the larder north. The servants were fewer, and the barriers between them and the family lower.
The fronts were simple: roughcast or brick walls, often whitened, tile-hung upper storeys, casement windows in long bands under the eaves (Baillie Scott thought the sash a town window), and steep roofs brought low over the walls. Bay windows remained, now square and wide. Inside, panelling and plain painted woodwork, built-in seats and cupboards took the place of Victorian ornament.
The garden city carried the type into whole new towns. Letchworth (from 1903) and Hampstead Garden Suburb (from 1907), both planned by Parker and Unwin, set such houses in groups round greens, with gardens front and back, at a density of about twelve to the acre. Their model shaped the council housing of the 1920s and the suburbs of interwar England.