The Art of Building a Home: A collection of lectures and illustrations

by Barry Parker; Sir Raymond Unwin

Any house is cold all through the winter months unless a fire of some kind is kept burning in the hall; many people, therefore, find it necessary to have a stove or heating apparatus; and, in most houses, it is thought necessary to have two other fires burning, one in the living room, and one in some other room that there may be somewhere to show visitors. Now when the hall is also a sitting room, with a fire in it, we get, for the trouble and expense of two fires, all the advantages ordinarily attaching to three.

I must now pass on to Decoration and Furniture. The best test of the artistic merits or demerits of a room as a whole, is the impression it makes, on one’s entering for the first time. We can get accustomed to anything, and it is from this fact, taken in conjunction with what we have already noted, of the power as an influence for advancement or degradation of beautiful or unbeautiful surroundings, that the importance of our subject to-night is partly drawn. And what should be our feeling, on entering a room? Simply this: How exquisitely comfortable! For the first essential in the form and design of any decorative object, (and everything in a room should be a decorative object), is reposefulness. I feel herein to be guilty of giving utterance to a truism, and I should hardly dare to state so obvious a fact, were it not that I see this first principle so almost universally violated; for, if this test of reposefulness is the test, the average farm house kitchen has an artistic value far beyond that of ninety-nine out of every hundred drawing rooms in the kingdom; and I will endeavour to show why.

The first fault in our rooms which contributes to this result is over decoration. This is an almost universal failing. Everything has a pattern on it and almost every pattern is mechanically produced, run out by the yard, and cut off just where it happens to be when the time comes for it to finish. No pattern bears any relation to any other pattern, and the whole effect is fidgety, fussy, and painful to a degree. Nothing is let alone, but every surface must needs be worried and tortured into some unwholesome form of altogether soul-less ornament. We cannot even find rest for our weary eyes on the ceiling, for tortuous intricacies of design meet them there also.

The second fault I wish to refer to, is that all this ornament is made to shout, everything is clamouring for notice. It would not be in place for me to say much here about those rooms in which any one element of decoration is in such flagrantly bad taste as to be noticed, immediately on entering, with a sort of start and feeling of “Oh! wall-paper,” or “Oh! carpet,” or whatever it may happen to be. (A designer will often aim at this for the sake of the advertisement and at the sacrifice of his artistic principles). But even when this extreme is not reached, everything seems trying within certain limits to assert itself, to attract attention.

Now any ornament you notice when you do not look for it, or perhaps I might better say, when you do not wish to think of it, is necessarily in bad taste. The degree of assertiveness admissible in a decorative object depends upon the degree of its naturalisation or conventionalisation, or, to put it another way, on the degree in which it is fine or mechanical. And though we cannot pretend to regulate by rules of this kind, pictures which are direct mirrors as far as possible of real things, yet, in so far as they are mural decorations, they come under this law.

Mr. Ruskin’s wall, painted to look like a vinery, would admit of much more forcible treatment, being entirely painted by hand and as true to nature as possible, than would a wall with a printed vine pattern on it in which there necessarily was repetition. And natural flowers painted may fittingly be treated much more forcibly than would be admissible in a purely conventional design, because natural flowers, hills, & trees, cannot become assertive enough to influence one disquietingly. Therefore the more nearly approaching to nature, the more assertive may be our ornament, or rather the less assertive it will be from this very reason, and therefore may be the more forcible in treatment. So we can stand, in a conventional pattern design, a degree of contrast in tones, which we could not tolerate in flat masses of colour.

One of the chief underlying causes of this failing of fussiness we have noted, is, that a room is scarcely ever designed as a whole, never enough thought of as a whole. The designer of each individual thing, knowing nothing of the form or character which anything else in the room was going to take, thought only of his own design, & worked enough interest into it to make it all-sufficient in itself; and the consequence, when his design gets put into a room in conjunction with a lot of other things, all designed in just the same spirit, is, that restlessness we have been deploring.

A room is a place in which to think of other things besides those relating exclusively to the room itself, and so much incident and interest should not be worked into it as to distractingly affect the pursuance of these thoughts & occupations. I say again, any ornament which you notice when you do not wish to is necessarily in bad taste.

When choosing anything, a wall paper for instance, we forget that we are, while so doing, devoting all our thought and attention to the design we are considering; and that, though pleasing under these circumstances, it may not be equally so to have by us when we wish to think of other things, or in the position for which we intend it. Now no flat mechanical ornament, designed to cover a large space, should ever be so designed that you are able easily to trace the pattern at the other side of the room. Please do not understand from this that it should be small in design; far from it; things small in design are, almost necessarily, finikin and therefore unreposeful; but being quiet and retiring in colour and contrast of tones, whether large or small, let it reveal, when you come to have leisure to examine it, vigorous broad and direct treatment, good loving thoughtful drawing, real artistic conception, and perception of beauty in form and line.

How seldom we get these qualities: how laboured and unspontaneous most patterns are! Into what unwholesome forms the ornament is tortured, how the one aim seems to be to make the design as restless and fussy as possible! A sort of feeling pervades the whole, that the designer could not let the thing alone.