Studio: international art (11.1897)

Revival of English Domestic Architecture

portion to the dimensions of the whole building
instead of a lot of little rooms and narrow, unneces-
sary passages.

Readers of The Studio will possibly remember
a plan and elevation for an artist's cottage (Vol. IV.
p. 34). where in a building estimated to cost between
£~oo and ^800 there was a living-room 28 ft. by
14 ft This of course was in place of two so-
called drawing and dining-rooms, 14 ft. by 14 ft.,
which the average little villa would offer you; but
although there was no other "reception-room," a
passage at the back was widened, and by the addi-
tion oi a bay window figured as a smoking-room, or
picture-gallery, some 20 ft. long, by 9 ft. wide in the
bay and 6 ft. at either end. In short, the house was
planned for people who prefer the easy, if uncon-
ventional menage, to the discomfort of the dull,
orthodox routine. In place of a stuffy little parlour,
and an equally stuffy little feeding apartment, you
had one spacious room and one handy lounge,
availilc when domestic economy required the other
to be giwn up to "laving the cloth" or other
household duties.

It is perhaps this tendency of real economy
designed to provide for actual comfort in place of
imaginary luxury which repels certain people from
Mr. Voysey's work. In the last "Arts and Crafts"
a roofed bedroom chair was the object of much

zealous detraction. As it chanced, the present writer

when writing about this particular item was under-
going the ordinary discomfort of a common cold,
and ritting at his work beneath a studio sky-light :
consequently he thought of the ch air with personal
recognition of its draught-screening powers, and
Wished he had been lucky enough to own it. Ib-

did not think of it as one of eight or ten—all
hooded—around a dining-room table, because it
wTas clearly intended for an invalid's use. Vet to
hear certain comments upon it, one would have sup-
posed that it was Mr. Voysey's idea of a work-a-day
chair, subject to many changes of place. So the
cottages he plans for ample sites, with side as well
as front lighting, must not be criticised as his idea
of a small house in a London street. Vou have but
to study certain houses in Hans Place, S.W., to see
that the architect is quite as able to grapple with
the artificial conditions of crowded life in a neigh-
bourhood where ground is costly, as with a cottage
site where land is cheap. Nor if your habit of living
necessitates formal hospitality would he give you a
living-room and a lounge in place of the conven-
tional reception-rooms of a town mansion. His
simplicity of detail may be governed by pecuniary
economy in one case : but as you remember the
Hans Place houses, you will not find more liberal
expenditure lavished upon the ornamental fittings
of the builder's catalogue. In England, where
domestic life gathers to itself so many purely
ornamental objects—pictures, porcelain, and the
rest—the rooms themselves cannot fitly receive the
same richness of treatment that in a continental
salon, with its sparse furniture, seems so eminently
right. Here the two styles are not pitted against
each other, for both are legitimate provision for the
actual needs of the occupant. l!ut recognising the
fondness of an English householder for all sorts ol
extraneous objects of art and vertu, it is well not to
make the rooms so completely self-sufficient that
every added item helps to mar their original effect.
I low well Mr. VoyseyhaS realised golden silence

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