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

by Barry Parker; Sir Raymond Unwin

But it is time to sum up our position and note the general conclusions to which we are led. I have described some of the defects we most commonly see in planning, and the arrangement of the hall; the entire want of reposefulness, (that infallible criterion of good ornament), that troubles the man of taste in nearly all domestic decorative work; and the lack of fitness in the furniture that is generally crowded into the rooms of smaller middle class houses, which adds the final touch to the complete failure, from an artistic point of view, of the great majority of such rooms.

I further mentioned as causes generally contributing to this failure, over-decoration, the covering of all surfaces with a mass of incongruous patterns, quite fatal, even where the designs are in themselves good: the effortfulness of most ornament, by which every pattern seems to clamour for notice, in which connexion I stated as a guiding principle, that any ornament you notice before you look for it, is likely to be in bad taste. Further I noticed the laboured and unspontaneous character of so many of the designs themselves and the lack of good drawing in them, and hinted that this arose partly from the designer’s dread of repeating himself, and his eagerness to produce something fresh without considering whether it was better. Finally I drew attention to the way in which so many rooms are furnished with cheap imitations of better or more esteemed materials, decorated with cast, or otherwise mechanically produced imitations of hand-wrought ornament, and the general unfitness, and ready-to-move look, which results from there being no fixed furniture, but all having been designed without any thought of the room, and the room planned without any view to its furniture.

I have several times hinted that the entire lack of unity, which is the inevitable result of all this, must continue, so long as our rooms and our houses are never thought out as a whole, so long as one man plans the building, another arranges the decorations, and a third picks up the furniture of twenty designers, here and there and everywhere. It is essential to any good result, that one man should design the house as a whole. I do not mean necessarily that he should design everything in it, or draw with his own hand every detail; but he must exercise a controlling power, selecting where he does not design, and ensuring that the work of all may be done in a spirit of co-operation towards the complete whole which he planned.

You will all be wishing to ask me, I doubt not, how this is possible in our days of speculative building, short leases & shorter tenancies. I must at once admit that to a large part of this work such a system is inapplicable, though even here much could be done if each department made what improvements are possible irrespective of the others. The lack of power to control the decorations does not excuse a badly planned hall. But outside the purely speculative building there is yet a large amount of work to which the system is applicable, in greater or less degree, such degree mainly depending on our clients: and here we have the real difficulty. We are powerless to compel our clients, nay, to a large extent, the client has a right to have his own way.

I suppose a doctor is in a similar fix; he is called in to prescribe for a patient and finds his prescription is useless because the patient will continue to smoke; he does not, if he is worth anything, accept the situation; but he explains that smoking is, in this case, fatal, that it renders his skill unavailing; and, if all his advice is neglected, he will finally refuse to act.

Architecture is rightly called a profession only when the architect advises his client what is best, and brings the whole weight of his knowledge and experience to persuade him from anything foolish, or in bad taste. When he produces to order some plan of which he cannot approve, he is merely a merchant of plans.

While speaking of this duty of the architect, I would not be thought to make light of many conditions of modern life which will, so long as they continue, and to the extent to which they spread, hinder all attempts to produce beautiful and dignified homes. One such condition is the instability of social position; everyone is seeking to get a step further up the social ladder. The result is a demand for houses which look as though they belonged to the social grade next above that of the people who are to live in them. To such untrue aims art refuses any countenance; and it is well. But there is an already great and daily increasing number of those who are weary of this fruitless struggle, of a life spent in work entirely without interest or beauty, or the power of giving a vestige of real pleasure, that they may have the means to acquire things without interest, beauty, or the power of giving any pleasure beyond the sordid satisfaction of letting Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So see they can afford to have them. These are anxious to find houses suited to their genuine wants, houses in which the work will be reduced to a minimum, and the beauty increased to a maximum, by the only true method of making all the useful and necessary things beautiful; not by the false method of keeping all useful & necessary things out of sight, trying to conceal their purpose or to appear unconscious of their existence, and substituting for them things recognised to be useless but regarded (so long as the fashion lasts at any rate) as beautiful.

This polished mahogany life of ours, with stucco trimmings and jerry joints presented for view to our visitors and acquaintances in the front room, is not, I believe, what many of us really want; we are tired also of the dismal and cramped, but at anyrate real, back office, back room, and kitchen life; & many are looking for houses in which they shall not spend their labour for that which is not bread, but shall be able to live a life of less artificiality than our present complex 19th century existence, a truer, healthier life altogether.

I have just said, that the true method of making a room beautiful is to make all the necessary and useful things in it beautiful; so much is this true that it becomes almost impossible to design a really beautiful room that is to have no useful work done in it or natural life lived in it. An architect called upon to design a room in which nothing more earnest is to be done than to gossip over afternoon tea has, indeed, a sad job.

For a room must always derive its dignity or meanness from, and reflect somewhat, the character and kind of occupation which is carried on in it. For instance, the studio of an artist, the study of a man of letters, the workshop of a carpenter, or the kitchen of a farmhouse, each in its position and degree, derives a dignity and interest from the work done in it. And the things in the room bear some relation to that work, and will be the furniture and surroundings natural to it; as the bench and tools in the carpenter’s shop; the easels and canvasses in the studio; the books and papers in the study; and the bright pans and crockery in the kitchen. All these lend a sense of active, useful, human life to the room, which redeems it from vulgarity, though it be the simplest possible; and no amount of decoration or ornamentation can give dignity or homeliness to a room which is used as a show room, or in which no regular useful life is lived. For in the work room all things have a place, by reason of their usefulness, which gives a sense of fitness and repose entirely wanting in a room where a place has obviously had to be found for everything, as in a drawing room.