Principles for an Arts and Crafts Home
Principles for an Arts and Crafts Home
I realize I haven’t talked much about it lately (except for the last Posy of Pansies), but architecture is one of my favorite studies. I should say the principles of architecture, since I know next to nothing about the details of the actual profession. Allow me to quote from a previous post: “I always had my ‘own’ ideas about what made a house beautiful, and I was thrilled to find that there is an actual name to express them: the Arts and Crafts movement. Its founder, William Morris, lived during the age of industrialization and was discouraged by the shoddy, uninspiring work being mass-produced at the time. He was also disgusted by the gaudy pretension of the Victorian decorators and instead strove for fine work that honored the intelligence and imagination of the craftsman. In order to provide the public with truly beautiful and useful work, Morris began his own company. He insisted on the best and most natural materials, simple lines, ‘homely’ beauty, and creativity. Their mission, as expressed by Walter Crane, was ‘to turn our artists into craftsmen and our craftsmen into artists.’
The Arts and Crafts movement is about authenticity, simplicity, individuality, endurance, beauty. It has strong feelings for history, nature, culture, and season. It is the marriage of romance and fantasy to practicality and comfort.
When you are done reading the following listing of “principles for an Arts and Crafts home,” you may want to read my previous post The Architecture of Television. Immediately below is a brief quote from that excellent and thought-provoking selection from James Howard Kunstler.
As the outside world became more of an abstraction, and the outside of the house lost its detail, it began to broadcast information about itself and its owners in the abstracted language of television, specifically of television advertising, which is to say a form of communication based on simplifications and lies. As in television advertising, the lies have to be broad and simple because the intended audience is a passing motorist who will glance at the house for a few seconds. So, one dwelling has a fake little cupola to denote vaguely an image of rusticity; another has a fake portico à la Gone with the Wind, with skinny two-story columns out of proportion with the mass of the house, and a cement slab too narrow to put a rocking chair on, hinting at wealth and gentility; a third has the plastic pediment over the door and brass carriage lamps on wither side, invoking "tradition." The intent is to create associations that will make the house appear as something other than the raised ranch it actually is, something better, older, more enduring, resonant with history and taste.
1. A home should be beautiful... “If I were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing to be most longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House.” (William Morris, “Some Thoughts on the Ornamented Manuscripts of the Middle Ages,” 1894) Vaulted ceilings and fashionable kitchens are glamorous, but a singing house finds its truest beauty in “things the children can keep inside.”
2. ...and built to endure. The Arts and Crafts movement rejects today’s mindset of disposability. The true artisan and craftsman does not use cheap, substandard materials and shoddy construction with the idea of momentary convenience and profit, but instead does his very best with the thought of the coming generations. “When we build, let us think that we build forever.” (John Ruskin)
Are Beauty and Endurance Interrelated?
“Along with this dawning appreciation for the long-term comes the recognition that we will take care of things that are beautiful. Beauty, more often than not, comes from careful crafting. And when a well-crafted object ages, no matter what it is, society almost always helps it to age well. Just look at the buildings our culture has chosen to preserve—all of them were well-designed. Owner after owner of such homes has recognized the treasure inherited and cared for them lovingly.” (Sarah Susanka, Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live)
3. Smaller is better than bigger. Homes are not meant to impress and overwhelm, but to nurture, welcome, embrace. Rather than spend money for space you’ll never use, spend that money on the architectural and design details that actually give a home dignity and character. “So many houses, so big with so little soul.” (Sarah Susanka)
4. Details are important. “In a completed home [floor-plans and square footage] are only a very small part of what makes an impression. What also defines the character of a house are the details, such as a beautiful stair railing, well crafted moldings around windows and doors, and useful, finely tailored built-ins. These details are what attract us to older homes.” (Sarah Susanka) “...It’s wiser to spend your money constructing a top-quality, intelligently and beautifully designed small house than an ordinary big one.” (Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons) Care, skill, craftsmanship, and artistry is evident in every corner of the house.
5. A house should relate to its natural surroundings, should enhance rather than dominate its environment. “A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surrounding if nature is manifest there, and if not, try to make it as quiet, substantial and organic as she would have been were the opportunity hers.” (Frank Lloyd Wright, “On Architecture,” 1941) “Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else; it is also about the cultural setting and the ambiance, the whole affair.” (Michael Graves) It should be as though the house was “a part of the environment from its beginnings and has been growing up with the environment ever since.” (Helen and Scott Nearing, The Good Life)
6. Buildings should be constructed from carefully selected natural, indigenous materials and should be built in the local tradition both for economic and aesthetic reasons. “The owner who sends far overland for unusual marbles or granites with which to build his house does not thereby achieve individuality, but the one who, for reasons of economy, digs up the forgotten local stone of the country—he does!” (Edwin Bonta, The Small-House Primer, 1925) The title of Kunstler’s book The Geography of Nowhere comes from his point that our generic, mass-produced architecture has resulted in the fact that Everyplace looks like No-place in particular. We adore old European and Mediterranean towns because each is so lovely and unique, yet at home we have sacrificed our own cultural and geographical distinctiveness for nondescript rows of houses.
7. Simplicity is the keynote. The house should not be cluttered by useless items. “Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” (William Morris, “Hopes and Fears for Art,” 1882) “To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is the one great office of decoration.” (William Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” 1877) Furniture should be “solid and well made in workmanship, [which] in design should have nothing about it that is not easily defensible, no monstrosities or extravagances, not even of beauty, lest we weary of it.” (Morris)
8. Form and function, beauty and utility should unite in the structure. Symmetry and harmony are part and parcel of a building’s line and form, and cannot be added as icing to a cake. “ We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.” (John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1880) As a rule (with exceptions, of course) exterior decoration detracts from architectural beauty. “I have great faith that if the thing is rightly put together in true organic sense, with proportions exactly right, the picturesque will take care of itself.” (Frank Lloyd Wright, “On Architecture,” 1941)
9. The home should be an expression of the personalities and lives of its residents. The home is the intimate dwelling place of a family, not a showcase of pretension. It is for living in, an extension of our own character. Le Corbusier called the home the treasure chest of living. Fill it with those things that are precious to you, that have real meaning and value to your heart. The home is not the place to clutter with things that you really don’t care about and that have no real connection to your life. Too often we find “cookie-cutter houses”: generic, meaningless, ugly, disposable. These express the modern mass mentality that demands good looks even at the expense of personal meaning. It is an acceptance of “a prepackaged, off-the-rack lifestyle” rather that “working to make something of our own.” (Rod Dreher) Artistic homes, gardens, and furniture should celebrate the individuality of the dwellers. Floor-plans and designs should actually suit your own daily lifestyle rather than accommodate society’s expectations.
10. A home should be authentic. We should not resort to what Kunstler calls “tacked-on symbols” to create a false sense of tradition or beauty. A home should be genuine and honest: there are no false wells, veneering, or plastic door pediments. See The Architecture of Television. Furniture should be unpretentious and adapted to “need, solidity, a kind of homely beauty and above all absolute dissociation from all false display, veneering and the like.” (unknown)
11. The building and furnishing designs should be well integrated. The home should be connected, not fragmented. The furniture should be a real and necessary part of the whole.
12. Stereotypical garden plans are rejected in favor of natural groupings and an idealized profusion of sweet-smelling, indigenous flowers. “The best results can only be got by the owner who knows and loves his ground.” (William Robinson) I would highly recommend Graham Rice’s All-In-One-Garden and Christopher Lloyd’s The Cottage Garden.)
Bibligraphy
Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher
The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, Helen and Scott Nearing
Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, Sarah Susanka
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Home, Pamela Todd.
Text: Principles for an Arts and Crafts Home. © Handmaidens of the Shepherd, June 2008.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008