RE-EQUIPPING THE 30’S HOUSE
When in 1858 Philip Webb designed ‘The Red House’ in Bexleyheath for William Morris, it marked the beginning of the Arts & Crafts Movement in British domestic architecture: rejection of the formal, urban, historical, neo-classical country houses as models: instead, function was freely matched to appropriate and pleasing forms and materials found in nature and the vernacular. It coincided with the beginning of demand for houses by middle class families, which led after 1919 in the explosion of house-building which resulted in the inter-war suburbs. Now approaching 100 years in age, houses constructed between the wars are the most numerous in Britain and dominate the outer parts of every British town. They were produced in the Arts & Crafts style, debased and simplified, and referred to as ‘Tudor Revival’—usually in pairs, with garages and a shared drive– to meet a new demand for mass home ownership. They were built quickly, efficiently and cheaply, using a restricted palette of materials and forms, but today are still popular and well used.
Ironically , while the Arts & Crafts Movement saw the house and its landscape as a single design, and while most purchasers of 30’s houses were keen to retreat from the unsatisfactory conditions in the city centres, the street environment of these houses, on green-field sites, was not a priority at the time of their construction: they were marketed as individual refuges, providing privacy for the owner and his family. Typically the front garden would simply be grassed, and immature privet plants planted along a low brick wall topped with railings, posts or a chain marker. Most streets had no street trees.
Such a house in West London was the residence of an artist client who asked us to make proposals for a new, modern design for the front garden environment and the boundary to the street, with the intention of elevating it to the level of art. We produced designs based on 4 schools of design prevalent between 1860 and 1939: Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and De Stijl.