Chapter 15 The Development of the Detached House in England and America From 1800 to 1900
In the long story of man’s dwellings from prehistory to the present, the Anglo-American development that took place in the hundred years between the 1790s and the 1890s is of considerable significance, particularly as it provides the immediate background of the twentieth-century house. Architectural history has generally been little concerned, in dealing with periods earlier than the eighteenth century at least, with the habitations of any but the upper classes. The study of rural cottages in various regions of the world has been more a matter for anthropological investigation; the housing of the urban poor, when that was other than the makeshift adaptation of grander structures fallen into decay, remains for most early periods a matter of mystery. We know that ancient Rome had its blocks of middle-class flats of many storeys; although the links are not easy to recover, there was certainly some continuity in Mediterranean lands between that form of urban housing in antiquity and what can be traced from the medieval period down to the nineteenth century. Northern Europe in the late Middle Ages saw rather the development of individual urban dwellings with party walls, ancestors of the terrace-houses that first appeared in England in the seventeenth century.
The detached house of moderate size, so familiar today, the principal type of dwelling to undergo notable development in the nineteenth century in Anglo-Saxon countries, has no such remote Classical origins as the Continental flat or apartment. It made its appearance as the dwelling of the yeoman when economic conditions in late medieval England encouraged the rise of a class between the feudal landowner and the peasant parallel to the skilled artisan class in the towns. The conditions of settlement of the British colonies in America, particularly in New England, encouraged the continuation through the seventeenth century of this type of dwelling almost to the exclusion of any other sort, since towns were then small and large estates rare. Around 1700 in America, though considerably earlier in England, relatively advanced contemporary modes began to have some influence on the design of such houses. With a lag of as much as a quarter of a century, the architectural developments of the home country were generally followed in the colonies; nor did political independence much affect the dependent cultural relationship in this field after the American Revolution.
The effects of the Picturesque point of view on the development of the house in England around 1800 were several (see Chapter 6). On the one hand, the newly fashionable attitude gave prestige to modest detached dwellings, raising the social status of the ‘cottage’ from an agricultural labourer’s hovel to a middle-class habitation or even on occasion a holiday ‘retreat’ for the upper classes—at first by adding the French adjective orné (Plate 122A). At the same time the status of the ‘villa’ tended to be reduced from a large Italianate mansion on its own estate to a moderate-sized house at the edge of town. In much of the prolific architectural literature of the period, the hierarchy of residential building types was Rousseauistically inverted as rustic models, both native and Italian, were proposed for emulation in edifices of fairly considerable size. Thus several modes of informal design that had made their eighteenth-century debut in garden ornaments received more serious attention from architects as they came to be considered suitable for medium-sized dwellings and even sometimes for quite large mansions. As we have already seen, the towered Italian Villa was first introduced as a modest detached house by Nash at Cronkhill in 1802. It was similarly utilized by Schinkel (Plate 14A) and Persius at Potsdam a generation later, although Royalty still preferred to dwell there in Grecian dignity or Castellated pomp (see Chapter 2). Somewhat later, however, the Italian Villa provided (none too happily) a Royal retreat when Prince Albert decided on this mode for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in the mid forties.
Not all Picturesque modes were equally adaptable to middle-class dwellings. The Indian found its most notable realizations in a large country house, S. P. Cockerell’s Sezincote, and a Royal folly, Nash’s Brighton Pavilion (Plate 48). There were, however, considerably later American examples322 on a somewhat more modest scale, such as Iranistan at Bridgeport, Conn., built for Barnum in 1847-8, and Longwood, near Natchez in Mississippi, designed by Samuel Sloan in 1860 that have been mentioned earlier. But the Indian mode contributed the veranda, henceforth an integral feature of American domestic architecture, though rare after the Picturesque period in England. Verandas very early lost the Oriental detail, however. In front of Rustic Cottages they were often supported by bark-covered logs, but they could also acquire the formal character of Italian loggias, Tudor arcades, Swiss galleries or, most frequently, Classical porticoes and ‘pilastrades’ when adapted for use with other current modes.323 In some cases the veranda, carried on occasion to two storeys in height, became the main theme of the exterior, yet was detailed so simply that no modish name properly applies (Plate 122A).
Even the Castellated mode, although used mostly for rather large houses (Plate 49), encouraged loose asymmetrical massing of the sort that is still more characteristic of the towered Italian Villa.
The Picturesque was thoroughly eclectic, in both possible senses of the word, as well as occasionally original. On the one hand, the point of view encouraged the parallel use of diverse modes. In theory, these were to be chosen according to their suitability to various sorts of natural settings, but in practice several were often employed side by side, as in Nash’s Park Villages in London, begun in 1827, and in the contemporary and later development of comparable suburban areas both in England and in America. On the other hand, the combination in one design of features derived from several different modes was allowable, even praiseworthy—low-pitched roofs with very broad eaves borrowed from the Swiss Chalet, towers from both the Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa, bay-windows from the Tudor Parsonage, and verandas from the Indian were all part of a common repertory exploited rather indiscriminately. Basic to the Picturesque point of view and often determinant of choice of mode and even of individual features was the preoccupation with the natural setting; verandas, loggias, bay-windows and prospect towers were desirable, even necessary, features because they made possible the fuller enjoyment of the circumambient scene.
All these features affected house-plans in detail; but domestic planning in general was not as consistently re-organized as might have been expected, if only because the Picturesque point of view was so predominantly visual rather than practical in its usual concerns. Asymmetrical massing allowed, even forced, asymmetrical planning, however, thereby encouraging functional differentiation of the disposition and the sizes of various rooms (Figure 21). Yet very often, behind irregular exteriors, the plans were only slightly dislocated from the formal patterns of the preceding Palladian period. Although the increased articulation of most house-plans allowed the introduction of windows on several sides of many rooms, more significant at this stage was the frequent use of irregular shapes for the larger rooms, their main rectangular spaces complicated by external oriels and by internal ingle-nooks. None of these individual changes can be very precisely dated, at least in the current state of knowledge of the development of the house-plan in this period. Almost all of them were generally familiar in England by 1810. Tudor Parsonages, whether or not occupied by members of the clergy, were likely to be most adeptly planned.324 In them the well-defined needs of a family of relatively high social status but low income encouraged a more efficient grouping of the rooms and a clearer distinction of separate functions—entrance hall, drawing-room, dining-room, study, kitchen, scullery—than had been common earlier in such medium-sized dwellings.
In the first third of the century the various Picturesque modes of house-design were very widely exploited in England for middle-class habitations in the new suburbs, having generally made their first appearance a decade or so earlier in lodges or other accessories to large private estates. They were also popular at the new seaside resorts, such as Sidmouth in Devon and Bournemouth in Hampshire, where they often housed more exalted clients. At Sidmouth, for example, what is now the Woodlands Hotel was remodelled from a barn into a barge-boarded Cottage Orné by Lord Gwydyr in 1815; the nucleus of the Knowles Hotel there was Lord Despenser’s cottage of a few years earlier; and the Royal Glen Hotel, a modest Castellated house then known as Walbrook Cottage, was built early enough to house Queen Victoria as a baby. Although the prestige of the Picturesque declined rapidly in high aesthetic circles after 1840, the rigorous principles of Pugin and the ecclesiologists had little effect on the operations of suburban builders, who continued for decades to follow the various well-established modes of a generation earlier.
As Latrobe’s ‘Gothick’ Sedgley, built outside Philadelphia in 1798, and various other Neo-Gothic structures in Philadelphia and Boston of the first decade of the new century make evident, the Picturesque came early to the United States. Yet it was hardly before the thirties that the various Cottage and Villa modes began to compete at all with the Greek temple and the formal post-Palladian house modernized by the use of Grecian detail; only with the appearance in 1842 of Cottage Residences by A. J. Downing (1815-52)325 were they enthusiastically propagated.
Earlier, new developments in the planning of the ubiquitous moderate-sized free-standing houses were not very notable in America. In the 1790s the influence of Adam, and possibly of the French, encouraged some experimentation with variously shaped rooms; but this largely died out as the necessary rectangularity of the Greek temple house, only extended by one or more wings in the largest examples, reimposed the formal Anglo-Palladian plan with central stair-hall and four nearly equal-sized corner rooms. For smaller houses with pedimented fronts, however, a sort of terrace-house plan was increasingly popular, with stair-hall at one side, two principal living rooms one behind the other, and a narrower kitchen wing extending to the rear. A planning innovation that first appeared in America in the 1790s, by no means unknown earlier in England but rare except in terrace-houses, was the opening together of two rooms—front and back parlours—by means of broad sliding doors. This became increasingly common after 1800. Moreover, the temple portico provided the equivalent of a shallow veranda across the front of the house and was sometimes replaced or supplemented by a deeper colonnaded porch at the sides or rear. The veranda, indeed, had reached the southern states fairly early in the eighteenth century, arriving from the East via the West Indies. In its usual two-storeyed form it was easily merged with the monumental colonnades demanded by the Grecian mode (Plate 38B).
Thus, even before a rather belated wave of strong Picturesque influence began to drive out the temple house in the forties, early nineteenth-century American houses had certain definitely post-Colonial characteristics in their plans. Of later house-planning in the United States in the forties and fifties almost everything that has been said about English planning in the preceding decades applies (Figure 22). By this time in England, however, newer planning ideas were being introduced by leading architects in relatively large houses. At Scarisbrick, for example, where the remodelling and extension of the existing Georgian house began in 1837, Pugin revived the medieval great hall (see Chapter 6). A few years later in his own house, The Grange of 1841-3 at Ramsgate,326 by no means a mansion in size or scale, the more modest two-storey hall incorporates the staircase and also provides, with the galleries above, the central core of communication. Parallel with these examples, which were of Gothic inspiration, Barry at Highclere adapted the glass-roofed central cortile of the Reform Club to domestic use, associating with it the main staircase rising in a contiguous vertical space.
At the hands of High Church architects the parsonage, by definition no mansion but a modest free-standing gentleman’s residence, was also undergoing a characteristic development. No longer Tudor, of course, it was still not forced to be archaeologically decorated in its planning, since there were few if any relevant medieval models to imitate. The doctrine of ‘realism’ condemned the shabby construction and careless use of materials that had too often been characteristic of Picturesque house-building in the previous decades, while the need for economy discouraged the ornamentation common on contemporary churches.
Such a vicarage as that which Butterfield built in 1844-5 to go with his ‘first’ church, St Saviour’s at Coalpitheath, Gloucestershire, is a model of simple masonry construction. In the random ashlar walls are set wide banks of plain mullioned windows, Gothic only in the arching of their heads, where they can serve best to light the various rooms (Plate 122B). The massing also is irregular yet orderly with several high gables, a porch, many tall chimney stacks, and a broad bow-window elaborating the basically rectangular block. But, in the language of the ecclesiologists, ‘the true Picturesque derives from the sternest utility’, and so all these projecting features were such as could be readily justified functionally, like the ritualistic articulation of contemporary churches. The plan of Butterfield’s vicarage has the virtues of those of the Picturesque Tudor Parsonages in the variety of room-sizes and shapes provided and also in the opportunities that the windows offer to enjoy surrounding nature. There is also at Coalpitheath a very modest version of Pugin’s stair-hall at The Grange, not a mere lobby but a central space designed for easy horizontal and vertical communication.
Any serious revival of medieval craftsmanship in masonry was all but impossible in America; in any case it was largely irrelevant in a land where most houses were built of wood. But in reaction to the white-painted clapboards and the smooth Grecian trim of the previous decades, echoing however humbly the marble of Greece, Downing in the early forties proposed and many at his behest adopted variant treatments for the exterior sheathing of Picturesque villas and cottages that were rather more expressive. The distinguished native craftsmanship evident in the more monumental edifices of the Greek Revival executed in fine ashlar of granite or other light-coloured stone, or else in smooth red brick, died out. Such materials had no more appeal than did crisp white-painted wood to a generation indoctrinated with the Picturesque point of view. Yet clapboards remained the usual surfacing material for wooden houses, even if they were now painted, not white, but in the stony hues—grey or beige—that Downing recommended in his books with actual coloured samples.
The treatment Downing preferred was board-and-batten.327 This he made a constituent element of the very original Bracketted mode that he offered as an American alternative to the imported Italian Villa and Tudor Parsonage which he was energetically engaged in nationalizing. Board-and-batten provides a stronger pattern of light and shade, and also the verticalism that appealed increasingly to mid-century taste. This sheathing also offers a sort of symbolic expression of the light ‘balloon-frame’328 construction that was beginning to come into general use by the fifties, though this method of wooden framing was apparently never known to Downing, since he died in 1852 before it reached the eastern states where he lived and worked.
With their board-and-batten walls, their ample verandas, and their bay-windows, what are still usually called ‘Downing houses’ constitute a largely original American creation in spite of the frequent use of Tudoresque detail on barge-boards and veranda supports and even of elaborately moulded terracotta chimney pots. Yet in their planning the houses designed by Downing and his architect friends Davis and Notman do not advance much beyond the models published in the English books of the previous decades that were their immediate prototypes (Figure 22). The verandas are usually wider and more prominent, however, and the front and rear parlours are likely to open into one another, as sometimes also into a modest central hall.
In America as in England, the Picturesque period came to no sudden end. The recurrent publication of Downing’s books even after the Civil War329 indicates how long his models remained favourites with American builders and their small-town and suburban clients. However, even before the Civil War a mansarded Second Empire mode was beginning to become popular (see Chapter 9). With the wide acceptance of this and of the High Victorian Gothic there developed a rather sharp split between autochthonous and imported types of house-design, drastically though the imported types were usually Americanized outside the bigger eastern cities. To this situation we must return later.
Something has already been said of the major turn that took place in the development of the English house around 1860 (see Chapters 9 and 12). When seen in relation to the parsonages that his master Street and also Butterfield had been building in the previous fifteen years, Webb’s Red House built in 1859-60 for William Morris is considerably less revolutionary than has sometimes been supposed. Had this been built in Gloucestershire rather than in Kent, it would certainly have been of stone like Butterfield’s Coalpitheath Vicarage; as it is, the entrance porch is no simpler or less Gothic than Butterfield’s. The particular window forms, moreover, can be matched in Butterfield’s Clergy House and School at All Saints’, Margaret Street, and the somewhat rustic ease of composition in his cottages at Baldersby St James. Yet the planning here is highly individual, suited to the special needs of a client who was an artist and a writer, not a parson.
The next house that Webb built, now known as Benfleet Hall, Cobham, begun in 1860 for the painter Spencer Stanhope, has been less publicized, and it never had the rich furnishings that Morris and his associates designed and executed for the Red House. Yet it is perhaps more significant in the general history of the Anglo-American house. There is here, for example, a small stair-hall of the order of Pugin’s at the Grange or Butterfield’s at Coalpitheath around which the other ground-storey rooms are loosely grouped. The particular character of the plan can, in fact, best be matched at Hinderton, a small country house in Cheshire that is hardly more of a mansion than Benfleet, which Waterhouse built in 1859. This house is in Waterhouse’s gawkiest High Victorian Gothic, with none of the simplicity and delicacy of Webb’s early houses. It is rather unlikely that Webb was actually emulating it, but the plan was twice published330 and hence soon known abroad.
Webb’s Arisaig in Inverness-shire was begun in 1863 (Figure 23). Built of local stone, it is somewhat more conventionally Gothic externally; moreover, it is of country-house size, a mansion rather than a modest artist’s dwelling like the Red House or Benfleet Hall. The plan has two major aspects of interest: the two-storeyed hall, with gallery above, occupies a central position and the principal rooms on both storeys are very efficiently grouped about it within the bounding rectangle of the main block of the house. In other words, Arisaig’s hall seems to derive as much from the Highclere sort of glazed central court as from Pugin’s revival of the medieval great hall.
Cloverley Hall, which was built by Nesfield and Shaw in 1865-8, attracted much favourable contemporary attention largely because of the superb craftsmanship of the brickwork and the originality of the japoniste ornament (see Chapter 12). It is destroyed now except for the extensive service and stable wings and the gate lodge; but the amount and the character of the fenestration, providing in some areas what amounted to window-walls of stone-mullioned and transomed lights, and the character of the plan make it still memorable. It was also the first of the many notable Late Victorian manor houses which both Nesfield and Shaw would build when working alone.
Like Arisaig, Cloverley was a large country house. The medieval great hall, first rather modestly revived by Pugin at Scarisbrick, here returned at full scale; but it was placed in a corner of the main block—as was occasionally its position in the sixteenth century—so that it might receive light from one end as well as from the side (Figure 24). From the entrance, however, one passed by this hall through the ‘screens’ under a gallery to arrive at a stair-hall, more in the manner of Waterhouse’s and Webb’s, around which the other principal rooms were compactly grouped. There was also here a very skilful play with levels, the hall being lower than the rest of the main floor, and therefore part-way down to the basement—containing a billiard room and so forth—which was entirely above ground at the rear of the house.
While Cloverley Hall was still in construction, Shaw had begun his own personal career as a house-builder at Glen Andred in 1866-7 (Plate 102B), where he introduced a more vernacular manner (see Chapter 12). Following this came his Leyswood in 1868-9, a mansion as large as Cloverley Hall and in some of its decorative features more archaeologically Late Medieval. As at Cloverley Hall, the amplitude of the fenestration, however, arranged here in long mullioned bands as well as in tall window-walls, has seemed more significant to posterity than the stylistic detailing331 (Plate 123). Above all, Leyswood marked a further stage in the development of the ‘agglutinative plan’ (Figure 19), of which the first well-publicized example was Waterhouse’s at Hinderton. Here the great hall and the stair-hall of Cloverley are combined to form a central spatial core of communication, somewhat as at Webb’s Arisaig, but the shape of this is quite irregular and the reception rooms are grouped very loosely about it, more as at Benfleet Hall. Projecting well out of the main block, the dining-room and the drawing-room both receive light from three sides. Moreover, the space of these rooms is articulated, as in certain Picturesque houses of forty and fifty years earlier, by ingle-nooks, oriels, and various other irregularities. Perspectives of Leyswood—not the plan332—were published in the supplement to the Building News of 31 March 1871 and made at once a tremendous impression both in England and in America (Plate 123).
In a house by Webb of the same date as Leyswood, Trevor Hall at Oakleigh Park, Barnet, in Hertfordshire, the arrangement of the rooms about the central hall was much more compact (Figure 25). The whole formed a square and allowed a quite symmetrical treatment of the three principal fronts. This house is now destroyed except for the gate lodge. Less interesting in plan but significant for its very modest size is Webb’s Upwood Gorse, Caterham, Surrey, built for Queen Victoria’s dentist Sir John Tomes also in 1868. The consistency and the simplicity with which the local vernacular of brick below and tile-hanging above is handled in connexion with plenty of white-painted Queen Anne sash-windows regularly but not symmetrically spaced offers a curiously close prototype of the American ‘Shingle Style’, although the initiators of that mode a decade later can hardly have known of this house, since it was never published. It was rather Shaw’s houses of the next decade, of which his drawings were exhibited each year at the Royal Academy and given great prominence in the professional Press, that provided the exemplars which architects generally imitated both at home and abroad; from 1874 on the plans were usually illustrated as well as Shaw’s own very virtuoso pen-drawn333 perspectives (Plate 123).
Webb’s houses for the painters Val Prinsep and G. B. Boyce in Kensington and Chelsea, of 1865 and 1869 respectively, were the first English ‘studio-houses’—houses, that is, in which the studios, naturally equipped with very large windows, were the principal rooms. These provided a more livable alternative to the great halls that Shaw generally provided in his country houses; but it was the larger artists’ houses of the seventies and eighties which Shaw built for his fellow academicians that received contemporary publicity.
By the mid seventies Shaw was moving in the formal and symmetrical direction initiated by Webb at Trevor Hall and soon carried much further by Nesfield at Kinmel Park as regards both the planning and the external organization of his larger London houses. Lowther Lodge in Kensington Gore of 1873-4 is the first of his domestic commissions that may properly be called Queen Anne rather than Manorial. The even more formally designed Cheyne House and Old Swan House, of 1875 and 1876 respectively, on the Chelsea Embankment followed shortly after (Plate 103); but he long continued to build more loosely composed houses in the country, as has been noted earlier.
Before turning to the results of Shaw’s very notable influence in the United States in the seventies, something should be said of the situation there in the preceding decade. The Second Empire mode had been increasingly popular for houses from the mid fifties and was especially fashionable during the boom period that followed the Civil War. It had no positive contribution to make to the general Anglo-American development in these decades, however. In the domestic field more or less Gothic modes were its significant rivals; first Downing’s wide-veranda-ed version of the Tudor Cottage; then, after 1860, what Vincent Scully has christened the ‘Stick Style’.334
On houses in this mode, which is really hardly Gothic at all, a sort of imitation half-timbering panels the exterior walls, suggesting, like Downing’s board-and-batten sheathing, the underlying wooden stud-structure of balloon-frame construction. This construction came to be generally used in the East as well as in the Middle West, where it originated, after it had been explained by William E. Bell in his Carpentry Made Easy in 1858. More striking is the open stickwork of the ubiquitous verandas. This can be seen in an early form on the Olmsted house in East Hartford, Conn., of 1849 by the English architect Gervase Wheeler,335 who obviously derived it from Picturesque models in England dating back at least to the thirties. In the J. N. H. Griswold house of 1862 in Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I., by the French-trained Hunt, now the Newport Art Association, the ‘sticks’ of the wall surface are so sturdy that they may well be the actual framing members.
Very characteristic of the maturity of the mode is the Sturtevant house at nearby Middletown, R.I., built by Dudley Newton (1845?-1907) a decade later in 1872. Here the gawky vigour of the Stick Style, its intense woodenness, and its descent from several different Picturesque modes—not least the Swiss Chalet—is very evident (Plate 124A). Extensive surrounding verandas are of the very essence of the mode; but the internal planning, while informal and often asymmetrical, is rarely very open. Several books by Eugene C. Gardner (1836-1905)336 of Springfield, Mass., give a sophisticated architect’s rationale of the mode. But the exemplars that G. E. Woodward337 offered in the sixties are more typical, and were more widely imitated in actual production; for the Stick Style had almost run its course by the time Gardner began to present his excellent house designs. Woodward was no architect, and for the most part the Stick Style should not be considered an architect’s mode. It represented rather a popular attempt, remarkably successful for a few years, to create an American domestic vernacular, suited to the materials in general use and to the current methods of building, comparable to Downing’s earlier Bracketted mode. Like the Second Empire vogue the Stick Style died out, at least in the East, during the general hiatus in building production after the financial Panic of 1873.
By that time Shaw’s influence had begun to reach America.338 Moreover, the possibilities of agglutinative planning about a great hall had been realized by Richardson well before a Shaw plan—that for Hopedene—was first made available in the Building News in 1874. It is, of course, possible that McKim, in passing through England on his way home from Paris in 1870, had seen (or merely heard of) the character of Webb’s, Nesfield’s, and Shaw’s houses of the sixties and transmitted that information to Richardson.
An undated project of about 1871 by Richardson for a house to be built in Newport, R.I., for Richard Codman includes his first great hall339 of the Shavian sort; but the Codman plan is already in advance of, or at least rather different from, those of Shaw. This hall, out of which the stairs would rise in an L-shaped at the rear, was to be very large in relation to the other rooms, and thus definitely a principal living area not a mere foyer or centre of circulation. The drawing room and dining room were to open out of the hall through wide doorways so that some sort of spatial continuity would have extended through all the reception rooms of the ground storey. There was to be a large veranda at the rear in the well-established local tradition. The exterior as shown in the elevations is not at all Shavian but rather related to the Stick Style, like Richardson’s own house at Arrochar on Staten Island of 1868.
Richardson’s first executed country house, the F. W. Andrews house of 1872-3 at Newport, R.I., was much more Shavian in plan. Four or five rooms were grouped about a relatively smaller central stair-hall and most of these were articulated by bay-windows and ingle-nooks. But the main block was also surrounded by verandas, features which are rare and always of modest extent on Shaw’s houses. The Andrews house was burned a long time ago, but from the existing elevations it would appear that the external treatment represented a sort of transition between the Stick Style, then at its apogee, and Shaw’s Surrey vernacular translated into American materials. The verandas were still detailed in a Stick Style way, and flat stickwork interrupted the continuity of the wall surfaces; but the clapboarding of the lower walls evidently took the place of the brickwork Shaw used—it was almost certainly painted red—and the wooden shingling of the upper walls was a happy substitute for English tile-hanging. Shingles were, of course, an old though largely forgotten American sheathing material long used especially for roofs.
By the time Richardson came to design his next large house, that for William Watts Sherman on Shepard Avenue in Newport in 1874, the perspectives of several of Shaw’s manors had appeared in the Building News and the plans of two. As a result, probably, of his assistant Stanford White’s Shaw-like skill with the pencil, the Sherman house was notably Shavian externally. Above the ground storey, which is of Richardsonian random-ashlar masonry in pink Milford granite with brownstone trim, the walls and the high roofs are covered with shingles cut in various decorative shapes suggested by those of Shaw’s tile-hanging. Many of the casement windows are grouped to form window-walls in the ground storey and arranged in long horizontal bands above. The half-timbering of the front gable, with painted decoration on the intervening plaster, was taken straight from Shaw’s Grim’s Dyke; the carved ornament on the barge-boards is almost Nesfieldian in its suggestion of japonisme. Thus the whole is as perfect a specimen of Shaw’s Manorial mode as anything any architect other than he or Nesfield ever produced in England. The house has since been much enlarged, partly by White in 1881, partly by Newton very much later, but always with due respect for the character of the original design.
The plan has more of the independent virtues of that of the Codman project. The hall provides a principal portion of the living area, and the other main rooms open into it through wide doors; thus there is some flow of space throughout the whole original block. The original library at the rear corner, later replaced by a large ballroom, ended in a Shavian rounded bay with a continuous window band, a feature Wright would copy later. Yet otherwise the house was less articulated than Shaw’s earlier ones, having rather the compactness though none of the symmetry of Webb’s Trevor Hall.
The mid seventies saw many other American reflections of Shaw’s Manorial mode and soon of his Queen Anne also, none of them so successful as the Sherman house. But the deep business recession that followed the Panic of 1873 led to a general mood of repentance after the extravagances, architectural and otherwise, of the post-war boom. From the resultant nostalgia for the simpler ways of the American past there began to develop at this time a great interest in the houses of the Colonial period, an interest that readily merged, however, with the current English preoccupation with the vernacular of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To an extent difficult for posterity to appreciate, the nascent ‘Shingle Style’,340 which crystallized towards the end of the decade with the revival of building production, was to its protagonists already a sort of Colonial Revival. Although its origins are partly Shavian, it represents above all a reaction, as did Shaw’s Manorial mode in England, against the ‘modernism’ of the High Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire, now grown thoroughly unfashionable except in the West.
Boston was still the architectural metropolis of the United States, and it was around Boston, especially in the work of Emerson and Little, the latter a serious early student of old Colonial work, that this crystallization of the Shingle Style first took place (see Chapter 13). But it was at once taken over and given a somewhat more Shaw-like elaboration by the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White, formed in 1879. From the early eighties, and for over a decade, the Shingle Style was widely practised by architects from coast to coast, and not least happily in the Far West. The characteristic use of shingles as an all-over wall-covering emphasized the continuity of the exterior surface as a skin stretched over the underlying wooden skeleton of studs, in contrast to the way the preceding Stick Style had echoed that skeleton in the external treatment. The shingles properly provide the name for a most characteristically American domestic mode; but it was in planning that American architects made the really original contribution in what was the most significant development of the detached house since the Picturesque period.
One of the first mature examples of the Shingle Style, a house built by Emerson on Mount Desert in Maine in 1879, well illustrates the virtuosity of the new planning (Figure 26). Rooms of varied shape and size are loosely grouped about the hall and open freely into one another. The various levels of the different areas are related to the landing levels of the elaborate staircase. Above all, it should be noted that the verandas are not mere adjuncts or afterthoughts, as they were even on Richardson’s Andrews house, but major elements, both space-wise and visually, of the whole composition. Such houses parallel in their three-dimensional complexity the massing of the Italian Villas of the earlier nineteenth-century decades with their loggias, pergolas, and prospect towers, yet they bear little or no visual resemblance to them, since the later houses are always much more sculpturally plastic and less articulated in composition. The windows are generally of double-hung small-paned sashes of a type at once Queen Anne and Colonial, but they are frequently grouped in the Shavian way, as well as being ingeniously placed in order to vary the internal lighting effects, so that the pattern of fenestration is not at all of an eighteenth-century order.
Richardson certainly did not initiate the Shingle Style; but he took it over in 1880 and made it very much his own, using it for all his later country and suburban houses. Dropping all detail, whether Richardsonian Romanesque, Shavian Manorial, Queen Anne, or American Colonial, he retained much of the ease and casualness of Shaw’s best early houses. But there is also a great deal of similarity to the simple massive effects of the old Colonial houses also. Spiritually, so to say, if not so much visually, Richardson’s shingled houses most resemble Webb’s best work; of these Richardson presumably had no knowledge, although it is just possible that he might have seen some when he was in England in 1882, well after the Shingle Style was fully established.
Richardson’s Stoughton house in Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., of 1882-3 is perhaps his best shingled one, at least in the relatively untouched form in which it, almost alone, alas, has come down to us (Plate 124B). It certainly shows little evidence of the interest that he is known to have taken in Burges’s and Shaw’s work while he was abroad just before this. The entrance, originally, was through the loggia recessed into the main mass of the house (it is now from Ash Street on the left). The living-hall extends, as in the Sherman house, from front to back and the stairs sweep up in a quarter-circle over the entrance. The drawing room at the corner and the dining room behind the loggia both open into the hall through wide doors; only the small library is isolated from the general flow of space. Externally, the shingled surfaces, broken only by banks of double-hung windows, model the complex mass into a unified composition, the almost submerged stair-tower successfully linking the two gabled wings at right angles to one another by its rounded form. There is no ornament of any sort, and the weathered grey of the shingles is varied only by the dark-green paint of the window sash.
McKim, Mead & White’s houses of the early eighties, several of them equally fine, are usually rather more elaborate in their massing and are likely to be enlivened with much imaginative detail.341 Some of the detail recalls this or that style of the past, but all of it is thoroughly personalized by White’s delicate hand. One of their best houses is the one for Isaac Bell, Jr, built in 1881-2 in Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I. (Plate #126:pl126). This is less unified externally than the Stoughton house but more open in plan (Figure 27). A wide veranda, with very elegant bamboo-like supports, extends around two fronts, expanding into a two-storeyed open pavilion on the right. This pavilion provides a semicircular void to balance the round tower at the rear left corner. The patterns of the original cut shingles on this house, although obviously suggested by English tiling, are much softer and more graceful, almost bringing to mind birds’ plumage.
Inside, the hall is articulated by a wide ingle-nook, rather dark and low, in sharpest contrast to the great flight of stairs beyond down which floods light from the window-wall at the half landing. Twenty-five-foot sliding doors, hung from above, make it possible to open the drawing room through almost its entire length into the hall. The Bell dining room, connecting at its end through French windows with the curved portion of the veranda, has some of the finest of White’s orientalizing detail. This is much more original than that in the new library he decorated at this time in the Sherman house or the dining room he added to Upjohn’s Kingscote, both also in Newport.
McKim, Mead & White’s slightly earlier H. Victor Newcomb house of 1880-1 in Elberon, N.J., is at once clumsier and more Shavian externally than the Bell house; but the spatial treatment of the living-hall is most original and very significant for later developments (Plate 125A). The main rectangular space, of which the shape is emphasized by the ceiling beams and by the abstract geometrical pattern of the floor, seems to flow out in various directions into other rooms and into several bays and nooks; but the actual room-space is sharply defined by a continuous frieze-like member that becomes an open wooden grille above the various openings. There can be little question that the major influence here is from the Japanese342 interior, but from the Japanese interior understood as architecture. This is not just a superficial matter of Nesfieldian japonisme such as White was employing so much in his ornament in these years. The Kingscote dining room has somewhat similar spatial qualities but more eclectic detailing and richer materials: marble, Tiffany glass tiles, cork panels, stained glass, etc.
In 1879 Cyrus McCormick had his Chicago mansion built by the local architect Adolph Cudell (1850-1910) and his partner Blumenthal in the form of a very corrupt Second Empire hôtel particulier. It is good evidence of the rapidity with which taste changed at this time that two years later he called on McKim, Mead & White to build for him in Richfield Springs, N.Y., one of the finest and most carefully composed of all their Shingle Style houses. This house is notable not only for the subtly Japanese character of the various sorts of veranda supports but even more for the way the composition is unified under the broad front gable by the long horizontal line of the veranda roof repeating that of the stylobate-like stone wall of the terrace below. It is most unfortunate that this house is now in a state of near-collapse.
Little’s contemporary Shingleside House of 1881 in Swampscott, Mass., has been mentioned already. Soberer than the Bell or the McCormick houses in its rectangular shape and almost total lack of exterior detail, this had a galleried two-storey hall with a window-wall as the principal living area. In the combining of different levels this house recalled a little Cloverley Hall, but it was completely Americanized in scale and in detail without being archaeologically Neo-Colonial.
By the mid eighties J. Lyman Silsbee (1848-1913) had introduced the Shingle Style to Chicago, and other Eastern architects were building good houses of this order in such Western towns as Cheyenne, Idaho; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Pasadena, California. In Philadelphia Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) developed the mode with a very characteristic personal difference, often eschewing the use of shingles. If his exteriors are rather English in their frequent use of brick and real half-timbering, his plans are most original. The long rooms of varied and irregular shape are strung out on either side of halls from which rise stairs within grilled enclosures of a sort that appeared in England only in the houses of the nineties by Voysey and his contemporaries.
The heyday of the Shingle Style was brief, even though it continued in use well down into the nineties. The Colonial Revival implications, present from the first, soon encouraged more and more comprehensive use of eighteenth-century detail, and this supported the general tendency of the mid eighties in America away from the irregular and towards more formal order (see Chapter 13). Something of this change could be seen in Richardson’s latest houses in masonry such as the Glessner house of 1885-7 at 18th Street and South Prairie Avenue in Chicago, which still stands, and the contemporary Mac Veagh house, long since destroyed, also in Chicago, both of which were almost symmetrical as regards their front façades. The most drastic examples, of course, of this Academic Reaction were such houses as McKim, Mead & White’s Villard group in New York (Plate 109B) and their H. A. C. Taylor house in Newport with its formal Anglo-Palladian plan of central hall and four corner rooms. Despite its even tighter plan, however, their extant W. G. Low house in Bristol, R.I., of 1887—a year later therefore than the demolished Taylor house—can properly be cited again as a masterpiece of the Shingle Style (Plate 127). This illustrates very well how the loose massing of the houses of the early eighties could be organized into a carefully balanced composition without succumbing to any historical mode of design, whether Italian Renaissance or American Colonial.
Particularly interesting in this connexion are the small houses at Tuxedo Park, N.Y., which Price designed for Pierre Lorillard in 1885-6, some years before he began to build Renaissance skyscrapers (see Chapter 14). Lorillard’s own house has a rather tight plan of the Neo-Colonial sort; but the exterior with its paired chimneys on the front, a Richardsonian entrance arch between them, and the verandas and terrace treated as voids carefully related to the solid mass behind is still in the earlier tradition (Plate 125B). In such other houses by Price at Tuxedo as those for William Kent and Travis C. Van Buren, the loose open plans of the immediately preceding years were organized into T and X patterns, and the verandas and terraces were even more formally treated as important elements in compositions made up of well-defined voids and solids (Figure 28).
This brings us to the beginning of the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, already introduced as an important coadjutor of Sullivan from 1887 to 1893. Although Wright’s mature career begins only about 1900 (see Chapter 19), his apprentice years as a builder of houses provide a very significant episode that is closely related to the earlier story of the nineteenth-century house in England and America. By the late eighties a full-dress Colonial Revival was under way in the East. But it was the particular combination of freedom and order that had been achieved by Richardson in his latest houses, by McKim, Mead & White in their Low house, and by Price in his Tuxedo houses which was the immediate tradition from which Wright’s domestic architecture grew far more than the work of Sullivan.
Born in 1867, Wright had had some two years in the Engineering School—there was no architectural school—at the University of Wisconsin when he came to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1887. He first found work in the office of Silsbee whom Wright’s uncle Jenkin Lloyd Jones had brought to Chicago a year or two earlier to design All Souls’ Unitarian Church, of which he was minister. The young architect’s first work, nominally a Silsbee commission, was the Hillside Home School built in 1887 for his aunts near Spring Green, Wisconsin. This was a rather provincial specimen of a Shingle Style house and was later demolished by Wright himself.
Shifting over the following year to the Adler & Sullivan office, Wright by 1889 was married and ready to build a house for himself on the strength of a five-year contract with his new employers. This house, at 428 Forest Avenue in Oak Park, Ill., still extant but much pulled about, derives almost entirely from Price’s cottages at Tuxedo except that the plan is much less formal. In the interior, the wide openings between the rooms are not framed by architraves but seem to have been produced by pulling back the walls beneath the continuous frieze. In this treatment, rather Japanese in concept, Wright would seem to have been influenced by White’s handling of the hall of the Newcomb house, even though that is rather Japanese also in some of the detailing and Wright’s is not.
Wright’s next important work is the James Charnley house at 1365 Astor Street in Chicago, built in 1891-2. This was actually a commission of the Adler & Sullivan firm, but one of which he had entire charge. A city house built of tawny Roman brick like that used for the court of the Boston Public Library, this is as formal343 as anything McKim, Mead & White had yet designed. But there is no High Renaissance or Colonial reminiscence whatever in the external detailing. The Charnley house is rather a conscientious attempt to emulate in a modest three-storey residence the highly original design of Sullivan’s newly completed Wainwright Building in Saint Louis.
Wright was also accepting various private commissions on the side, mostly very small ones, by this time. The George Blossom house of 1892 at 4858 Kenwood Avenue on the south side of Chicago, however, is of more consequence. Externally, this follows rather closely McKim, Mead & White’s Taylor house in the curved Ionic entrance porch and the recurrent Palladian windows, not to speak of the use of yellow-painted clapboards and white-painted trim of simplified academic character. Even the plan is for the most part symmetrically ordered. But behind the formal range of entrance lobby and two small corner rooms at the front the whole centre of the house opens up as a single great living-hall. In this living-hall a wide ingle-nook is lined up on axis with the entrance, the elaborate staircase rises in several flights across one end, and wide openings connect with the library and the dining room. The dining room, which ends in a curved bay with a continuous window-band, is almost a copy of the original library of Richardson’s Sherman house. In another Wright house of 1892, that for A. W. Harlan, also on the south side of Chicago, at 4414 Greenwood Avenue, which Sullivan happened to see, he recognized his assistant’s hand and this brought about the break between the two before Wright’s contract ran out.
When Wright set up for himself in 1893 there were two paths open to him. That he actually considered following the path of Academic Reaction, so heavily publicized by the success of the World’s Fair, is evident from his project of this year for a Library and Museum in Milwaukee (see Chapter 13). But when Burnham at this point offered to send Wright to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and then to the new American Academy which he and McKim were planning to start in Rome, in preparation for taking him on as designing partner, the young architect turned the opportunity down.
The W. H. Winslow house of 1893 in Auvergne Place in River Forest, Ill., always considered by Wright his ‘first’, shares many qualities with the Blossom and Harlan houses, but is altogether a much more mature and original work (Plate 128A). The front is completely symmetrical and as formal as that of the Charnley house of two years before.344 Broad and low, of fine Roman brickwork with a rich band of moulded terracotta the full depth of the upper-storey windows below the wide eaves, the general effect of this has usually been considered very Sullivanian. But as Wright himself was responsible for the Adler & Sullivan work that this house most resembles—the Charnley house, certainly; and the Victoria Hotel of 1892 at Chicago Heights, probably—it is more accurate to consider that the Winslow house represents a continuation of his own manner of the previous year or two. The plan is more axial and less open than that of the Blossom house, the still rather Richardsonian dining room with its rounded bay being placed here at the centre of the rear. The staircase, still so prominent in the Shingle Style way at the Blossom house, is here pushed out of sight between walls.
Wright’s next important house, that of 1897 for Isidore Heller at 5132 Woodlawn Avenue on the south side of Chicago, perhaps shows some Japanese345 influence in the succession of eaves-lines, one above the other. It is the development of the plan, however, that is most significant, as also the effect of the planning on the treatment of the exterior (Figure 29). The two principal living rooms are linked by a stair-hall into which they both open through wide apertures—no more mere doorways than in his own house of 1889, but tall breaks in the continuity of the walls. Although these rooms have ingle-nooks, they are not casual and cosy in the Shingle Style way but carefully ordered; both, indeed, are of regular cruciform shape. This shape, moreover, is given external expression in the plastic articulation of the external massing, an articulation that the multiple eaves echo above.
Two years later, in the Joseph W. Husser house, now destroyed, in Buena Park on the north side of Chicago, Wright’s personal development of domestic planning was carried much farther (Figure 30). Here the main living rooms were all raised to the first storey in order to have a good view of Lake Michigan, and the interior space was continued uninterrupted along the main axis of the house from the dining-room fireplace across the landing and through to the living-room fireplace. But the dining room was also articulated along a cross axis, extending outward into a large polygonal bay facing the lake, somewhat like the more Richardsonian bays of the Blossom and Winslow dining rooms.
Between the two houses just described, in which Wright’s planning developed so rapidly and so boldly towards unified but articulated space, came the River Forest Golf Club in River Forest, Ill. The front wing of this, built in 1898,346 showed a comparable maturing of his vocabulary of wooden construction. The two Chicago houses were both of brick with rather lush Sullivanian terracotta decoration below the eaves not unlike that on the Schiller Building. At the Golf Club the characteristic feeling of the Shingle Style for rough natural wood surfaces was revived by Wright but made more architectonic in scale. Below continuous window bands protected by his characteristic hovering eaves, the lower walls and the terrace parapets were sheathed with boards and battens, not applied vertically as by Downing, but horizontally. Uncovered terrace, covered veranda, glazed foyer, all were closely related spatial areas, the last two unified by the continuous roof. The only solid element was the broad stone chimney marking the point where the main axis and the subsidiary axis of the low side-wings crossed. In 1901 the building was much enlarged by Wright, but quite in the original spirit (Plate 128B).
In 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, with which this account of Wright’s beginnings may properly close, he built two houses side by side in Kankakee, Ill. He also designed for the Ladies Home Journal ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’ which was published in February 1901. The larger of the two Kankakee houses, that for B. Harley Bradley at 701 South Harrison Avenue, is a large, loosely cruciform composition with low-pitched gables projecting in blunt points well beyond the ends of the wings. The smaller Hickox house, next door at 687 South Harrison Avenue, has a more advanced plan under similar roofs. Wood stripping suggests the stud structure underneath the stucco of the walls as do also, and rather more directly, the wooden window mullions (Plate 142A). The living room here, flanked by semi-octagonal music and dining rooms, extends across the ‘garden front’ and opens by french doors on to the uncovered terrace (Figure 31). Here the articulated but unified space of the Husser house was reduced in scale and simplified until it provided a quite new concept of domestic planning, later to be widely influential internationally (see Chapter 22). Towards that new concept much of the development of the Anglo-American house since as far back as the 1790s may seem—not too exaggeratedly—to have been tending.
The Ladies Home Journal project for a ‘House in a Prairie Town’, from which the term ‘Prairie Houses’ for Wright’s characteristic production of the next decade derives, is larger than the Hickox house, but the living area was intended to be very similarly unified and articulated. In one version Wright even proposed carrying this space up two storeys in the centre, somewhat like one of Shaw’s manorial halls. As on the River Forest Golf Club, the long lines of the low hip roofs shelter very long window-bands—out of Shaw, via Richardson, presumably. Although the Ladies Home Journal house was intended to be stuccoed like the Kankakee houses, the window mullions echo the underlying wooden stud structure. As at the Golf Club, the chimneys would be the only really solid elements, passing up through the crossing volumes defined by the two levels of roof. The lower line of eaves extends, somewhat as on McKim, Mead & White’s McCormick house, over the porte-cochère on one side and over the veranda on the other, a treatment Wright had already tried out somewhat clumsily on the Bradley house.
In considering the significance of these Wright houses of 1900 it must be recognized that even in America they were highly exceptional. Despite the fact that the ‘Prairie house’ project was published in a general magazine of national circulation, its immediate influence was very slight indeed. For all the vigour of the two great Chicago achievements of the nineties, Sullivan’s skyscrapers and Wright’s earliest houses, the main direction of American architecture in 1900 was quite different. So also in the England of these years, where Shaw’s house for Fred White and his Bryanston had introduced by the nineties almost the same sort of Academic Revival as had McKim, Mead & White’s Villard and Taylor houses, the work of Voysey, the English architect most comparable to Wright, was also almost as exceptional. The line of architectural development had already split as sharply as in America, with the difference that the longer-lived Shaw himself had taken the lead in the academic direction that Richardson’s pupils, McKim and White, took in America.
Although Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941)347 was ten years older than Wright, it is understandable with English conditions that his architectural career got under way little earlier. From 1874 to 1880 he worked as a pupil in the office of Seddon; from 1880 until he set up for himself in 1882 he was assistant to Devey.348 In 1883 Voysey sold his first designs for wallpapers and printed fabrics, but for several more years he did little building. His first house, The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington in Warwickshire, was built only in 1888; in the next two years various projects of his, increasingly original in character, were published in the British Architect; of these the one for a house349 at Dovercourt of 1890 was the most advanced.
By the late eighties Nesfield and Godwin were both dead and leadership in English architecture, particularly as regards the domestic field, rested more firmly than ever in Shaw’s hands. The forces of innovation in English art were concentrated in the decorative field, thanks in part to Webb’s continuing activities with the Morris firm. But there is some question how well younger men like Voysey really knew Webb’s architectural work; almost none of it was published, and some of the best is hidden in remote parts of Scotland and the North of England. The work of A. H. Mackmurdo (1851-1942) was perhaps somewhat better known, but he was much more active with furniture, chintzes, and wallpapers than with building in the eighties. A project for a ‘House for an Artist’ that he published in his magazine The Hobby Horse in 1888 was of considerable promise, however. In any case Voysey soon rivalled Mackmurdo as a designer of furniture, wallpapers, and chintzes, and quite outclassed him as an architect. Mackmurdo’s most significant influence was probably abroad (see Chapter 16).
The existence of an earlier project dated 1888 for Voysey’s house for J. W. Forster at Bedford Park has led to some confusion. The executed house dates from 1891. Sometimes known as the Grey House, it is very different indeed from its neighbours, by this time some fifteen or more years old, by Godwin, Shaw, and their pupils. For one thing, its walls are covered with roughcast, already used by Voysey on The Cottage at Bishop’s Itchington; for another, it is a three-storey rectangular box, severe and rather formal beneath its low hipped roof, not quaint and irregular like even the simplest of the earlier houses. The casement windows are arranged in bands between stone mullions, regularly but not symmetrically, and the eaves troughs are supported by delicately curved iron brackets. Otherwise there is no external detail.
The plan of the Forster house is also compact and regular, with entrance on the left side and living room across the front. In other words this house represents as much of a reaction against the picturesqueness of the earlier Queen Anne as does Shaw’s Fred White house, yet is quite without eighteenth-century reminiscence.350
More interesting and more prominent than the contemporary storey-and-a-half house known as The Studio at 17 St Dunstan’s Road in West Kensington are a pair of terrace-houses, also designed in 1891 but begun only the next year, at 14-16 Hans Road off the Brompton Road in London. Here Voysey dropped the roughcast he had originally proposed and used Webb-like red brickwork with the windows characteristically arranged in bands between plain stone mullions. The elegantly original detailing of the projecting stone porches and the curved line of the parapets at the top are related to his contemporary decorative work and in notable contrast to the almost ‘Monumental Queen Anne’ treatment of Mackmurdo’s slightly later house next door at No. 12.
A moderate-sized country house, Perrycroft, Colwall, near Malvern, begun in 1893, may be considered Voysey’s first mature production, introducing in executed work the personal mode of design for which the Ward project of 1890 had already shown the way, and from which he never moved very far in later years. This is comparable, not to Wright’s ‘first’ house in River Forest of the same date, but to his more advanced work of the end of the decade, the River Forest Golf Club and the Hickox house. Roughcast walls, windows arranged in bands between plain mullions,351 a regular composition approaching but not quite reaching symmetry, these all follow from the Grey House and the Studio. But, being in the country, the house could spread out more. Moreover, the roofs were raised to a medieval pitch—45 degrees—so that their conspicuously heavy slating is as much a part of Voysey’s simple craftsman-like mode as are the off-white roughcast walls. The planning is closer to Webb’s than to Wright’s, the rooms being less symmetrically shaped and not opening at all into one another in the way of the Ward project.
A rather larger house, begun in 1896 on the Hog’s Back near Guildford in Surrey for the American Julian Sturgis, presumptive original of Santayana’s Last Puritan, has a somewhat less balanced composition with a prominent cross gable near one end (Plate 129A). The characteristic stone-mullioned lights of several of the rooms are here so extensive in their grouping as to constitute window-walls of the earlier Shavian sort.
In what is doubtless Voysey’s finest work, Broadleys on Lake Windermere, designed in 1898, the roofs are lower once more, and the window-walls are concentrated in three rounded bays along the lakeside terrace (Plate 129B). Here the hall in the middle is carried up two storeys, quite as Wright proposed to do in one version of his first Ladies Home Journal house (Figure 32). In its horizontality, its concentration of fenestration, and its avoidance of medieval feeling, this house represents the extreme point of innovation and originality in Voysey’s work.
His own house, The Orchard, at Chorley Wood in Hertfordshire, was completed in 1900. Externally this resembles closely his earlier houses, but The Orchard has two cross gables and hence a stronger feeling of symmetry. Towards this the more regular and carefully balanced spacing of the window bands further conduces. In studying the vocabulary of this house, a vocabulary destined to be parodied ad infinitum by architects and then by builders in the next twenty-five years, one can understand his feeling that he was a reformer not an innovator—the last disciple of Pugin, so to say, to whose secular work a line can be traced back via Webb, Street, and Butterfield. In Voysey’s special sense of continuity, which grew on him in later years, lies his great difference from Wright; for Wright was certainly determined, from the time he designed the Winslow house, to be as great an innovator—as much of an architectural creator—as was Sullivan in his skyscrapers. None the less, to look forward a little, such a house by Voysey as that now called Little Court at Pyrford Common in Surrey, built in 1902, is quite worthy of comparison with Wright’s masterpieces of that year (see Chapter 19). It shows little further development beyond his houses of the late nineties, however, except for a certain increase in horizontal emphasis.
Just before and just after 1900, Voysey’s work was very much better known and more influential in England, and increasingly in other countries,352 than was Wright’s either at home or abroad at that time. Moreover, many contemporaries in England were building rather similar houses. One of them, M. H. Baillie Scott (1865-1945), who also worked a good deal on the Continent, developed his planning much farther in the direction of Wright-like openness along the lines suggested by Voysey’s project of 1890 for the Ward house. The many houses, both executed and projected, that Baillie Scott published in Houses and Gardens in 1906 made his planning known to the young architects of the Continent (Figure 33). Characteristic is his Blackwell house on Lake Windermere of about 1900 with an enormous two-storey living-hall elaborated spatially by various ingle-nooks and so forth. The plan was published by Muthesius in 1904, and may well have influenced Adolf Loos in Vienna and other Europeans even before his own book appeared (see Chapters 20 and 21). After 1906 Baillie Scott’s work became quite ‘traditional’, and it is hard to believe that the projects published in the later version of his Houses and Gardens in 1933 are by the same man.
The name of W. R. Lethaby (1857-1931), later the biographer of Webb and an influential writer on architecture, should also be at least mentioned here. When Lethaby left Shaw’s office, where he had been chief assistant, he began his career by building Avon Tyrrell in Hampshire in 1891, a large brick country house closer to Webb’s than to Shaw’s in character. But his main contribution was not in the field of domestic architecture.353
Already by the mid nineties, the most successful English house-builder, more than rivalling Voysey in the quantity and occasionally even in the quality of his domestic work, was Sir Edwin L. Lutyens (1869-1944). Beginning like Voysey in the late eighties by building cottages, his first house of real distinction was the one he built for his cousin and frequent collaborator, the garden-designer Gertrude Jekyll, at Munstead Wood near Godalming in 1896. Several other good houses followed shortly, including notably The Orchards, Godalming, in 1898; but this early period of his work really culminates in Deanery Gardens at Sonning in Berkshire of 1901 (Plate 182B). In these houses are preserved all the best of the Shavian Manorial—the great timber-framed bay-window of the two-storeyed hall at Deanery Gardens is exemplary—simplifying and regularizing that mode under the influence of Webb and even approaching Webb’s standards of craftsmanship in the execution.
Like Webb in his later work, Lutyens used almost from the first a good deal of stylistic detail in interiors; he also turned back towards the ‘traditional’ in his exteriors considerably earlier than Baillie Scott when designing such houses as Overstrand Hall in Norfolk and Tigbourne Court at Witley in Surrey, both built in 1899 two years before Deanery Gardens. Lutyens became from about 1906 the leading architect of his generation in England, and his later work will be treated elsewhere (see Chapter 24). His increasing material success after the opening years of the century, rivalling Shaw’s in the previous generation, is to a certain extent the measure, though not the cause, of Voysey’s decline in popularity.
C. R. Ashbee (1863-1942) and George Walton (1867-1933)354 were other domestic architects active in the nineties and the early years of the new century. The latter belongs to the Glasgow School, of which Mackintosh was the principal figure, and like Mackintosh he was more decorator than architect (see Chapter 17). One house in England, The Leys at Elstree of 1901, may be mentioned here. The interiors are fine examples of the Arts and Crafts mode, as it is sometimes called, more stylized than Voysey’s but less original than Mackintosh’s. The plan is organized symmetrically around a large two-storey hall rivalling Baillie Scott’s of the period in its complex spatial development.
Ashbee was one of the first Europeans to appreciate the significance of Wright, and was appropriately chosen by Wasmuth to write the introduction to his second publication of Wright’s work in 1911 (see Chapter 19). Three houses by Ashbee side by side in Cheyne Walk in London, No. 37 of 1894 and Nos 38-39 of 1904, represent the chronological span of his significant architectural production and illustrate clearly his characteristic progress from the Shavian to an originality at least comparable to Voysey’s. Closely associated with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Ashbee was like most of these men except Voysey355 and Lutyens generally more active in the field of decorative art than in building. Right through this period English decorative art exercised a major influence on the Continent (see Chapters 16 and 17). So close is Mackintosh’s tie with the Continent that his schools and even his houses are better discussed in relation to the Art Nouveau.
Of all these English architects who have just been mentioned, Voysey was the most creative in the field of domestic architecture and, except for Lutyens, the most productive down at least through the early years of the twentieth century; after 1910 he built almost nothing at all. Yet Voysey did not die until 1941, by which time a younger generation, to his confusion, had accepted him as a father of a modern architecture that he disapproved as strongly as did Lutyens. In 1940 he returned almost from the grave to receive the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
From the Picturesque cottages of the opening decades of the nineteenth century to the early masterpieces of Wright and Voysey around 1900 is a far cry, further perhaps in the drastic revision that it represented of so old-established a building type as the dwelling-house than from Parris’s Market Street buildings in Boston of 1824 to Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott Store in Chicago as completed eighty years later in 1904. Yet in Anglo-American domestic architecture, quite as was the case with commercial architecture, real achievement recurred all through the century.