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 The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Art of
Building a Home: A collection of lectures and
illustrations
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Title: The Art of Building a Home: A collection of lectures and

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ART OF

BUILDING A HOME: A COLLECTION OF LECTURES AND
ILLUSTRATIONS ***
 Transcriber’s Note
Larger versions of most plates towards the end of this
eBook may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting
an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping
and/or stretching them.

THE ART OF
BUILDING A HOME.

MANCHESTER:
Chorlton & Knowles, Mayfield Press.

1901.
 HE ART OF
BUILDING
A HOME.
A Collection of Lectures and
Illustrations by Barry Parker
and Raymond Unwin.

Longmans, Green & Co.,

39, Paternoster Row, London,
New York, & Bombay,
1901.
PREFACE.
OME time ago I published a reprint of two of my
articles with illustrations which had appeared in
“The Building News.”
This little publication, though long out of print,
being still constantly asked for; and the need of
something to take its place being felt by us; the
question of re-issuing it arose. Instead of doing
this, however, it seemed better, as being a later and fuller
expression, to collect two or three of the lectures which my partner
and I had from time to time written for various audiences; and to
add by way of illustration some of the sketches and photographs we
had by us.
So came into existence this book in its present form.
BARRY PARKER,
The Quadrant, Buxton, 1901.
 CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK. Page.
Introduction I-VI
I. Of the Smaller Middle Class House 1
Barry Parker.
II. Of the Dignity of All True Art 21
Barry Parker.
III. Of our Education in Art 37
Barry Parker.
IV. Of Art and Simplicity 55
Raymond Unwin.
V. Of Furniture 69
Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.
VI. Of Building and Natural Beauty 83
Raymond Unwin.
VII. Of Co-operation in Building 91
Raymond Unwin.
VIII. Of the Art of Designing Small 109
Houses and Cottages
Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.
List of Plates and Plates at the end. 136
INTRODUCTION.
HE way we run in ruts is wonderful: our inability
to find out the right principles upon which to set
to work to accomplish what we take in hand, or
to go to the bottom of things, is simply
astonishing: while the resignation with which we
accept the Recognised and Usual as the Right
and Inevitable is really beautiful.
In nothing is this tendency more noticeable than in the art of house-
building. We begin by considering what, in the way of a house, our
neighbours have; what they would expect us to have; what is
customary in the rank of life to which we belong; anything, in fact,
but what are our actual needs. About the last thing we do is to make
our home take just that form which will, in the most straightforward
manner, meet our requirements.
It is too often evident that people, instead of being assisted, and
their lives added to, by the houses they occupy, are but living as well
as may be in spite of them. The house, planned largely to meet
supposed wants which never occur, and sacrificed to convention and
custom, neither satisfies the real needs of its occupants nor
expresses in any way their individuality.
The planning having been dictated by convention, all the details are
worked out under the same influence. To each house is applied a
certain amount of meaningless mechanical and superficial
ornamentation according to some recognised standard. No use
whatever is made of the decorative properties inherent in the
construction and in the details necessary to the building. These are
put as far as possible out of sight. For example, latches and locks
are all let into the doors leaving visible the knob only. The hinges are
hidden in the rebate of the door frame, while the real door frame,
that which does the work, is covered up with the strip of flimsy
moulded board styled the architrave. All constructional features,
wherever possible, are smeared over with a coat of plaster to bring
them up to the same dead level of flat monotony, leaving a clear
field for the erection of the customary abominations in the form of
cornices, imitation beams where no beams are wanted, & plaster
brackets which could support, and do support, nothing. Even with
the fire the chief aim seems to be to acknowledge as few of its
properties and characteristics as possible; it is buried as deep in the
wall, and as far out of sight and out of the way as may be; it is
smothered up with as much uncongenial and inappropriate
“enrichment” as can be crowded round it; and, to add the final touch
of senseless incongruity, some form of that massive and apparently
very constructional and essential thing we call a mantelpiece is
erected, in wood, stone, or marble, towering it may be even to the
ceiling. If we were not so accustomed to it, great would be our
astonishment to find that this most prominent feature has really no
function whatever, beyond giving cause for a lot of other things as
useful and beautiful as itself, which exist only that they may be put
upon it, “to decorate it.”
Could we but have the right thing put in the right place and left
alone, each object having some vital reason for being where it is,
and obviously revealing its function; could we but have that form
given to everything which would best enable it to answer the real
purpose for which it exists; our houses would become places of real
interest.
The essence and life of design lies in finding that form for anything
which will, with the maximum of convenience and beauty, fit it for
the particular functions it has to perform, and adapt it to the special
circumstances in which it must be placed. Perhaps the most fruitful
source whence charm of design arises in anything, is the grace with
which it serves its purpose and conforms to its surroundings. How
many of the beautiful features of the work of past ages, which we
now arbitrarily reproduce and copy, arose out of the skilful and
graceful way in which some old artist-craftsman, or chief mason, got
over a difficulty! If, instead of copying these features when and
where the cause for them does not exist, we would rather emulate
the spirit in which they were produced, there would be more hope of
again seeing life and vigour in our architecture and design.
When the architect leaves the house, the subservience to convention
is not over. After him follow the decorator and the furnisher, who try
to overcome the lifelessness and vapidity by covering all surfaces
with fugitive decorations and incongruous patterns, and filling the
rooms with flimsy stereotyped furniture and nick-nacks. To these the
mistress of the house will be incessantly adding, from an instinctive
feeling of the incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness of the whole.
Incidentally we see here one reason why the influence of the
architect should not stop at the completion of the four walls, but
should extend to the last detail of the furnished house. When his
responsibility ceases with the erection of the shell, it is natural that
he should look very little beyond this. There is no inducement for
him to work out any definite scheme for a finished room, for he
knows that if he had any aim the decorator and furnisher would
certainly miss it and would fail to complete his creation. If, when
designing a house, the architect were bearing in mind the effect
each room would have when finished and furnished, his conceptions
would be influenced from the very beginning, and his attitude
towards the work would tend to undergo an entire change. At
present he but too readily accepts the popular idea of art as a thing
quite apart from life, a sort of trimming to be added if funds allow.
It is this prevalent conception of beauty as a sweetmeat, something
rather nice which may be taken or left according to inclination after
the solid meal has been secured, which largely causes the lack of
comeliness we find in our houses. Before this idea can be dispelled &
we can appreciate either the place which art should hold in our lives
or the importance of rightly educating the appreciation of it, we
must realise that beauty is part of the necessary food of any life
worth the name; that art, which is the expression of beauty as
conceived and created by man, is primarily concerned with the
making of the useful garments of life beautiful, not with the
trimming of them; and that, moreover, in its higher branches art is
the medium through which the most subtle ideas are conveyed from
man to man.
Understanding something of the true meaning of art, we may set
about realising it, at least in the homes which are so much within
our control. Let us have in our houses, rooms where there shall be
space to carry on the business of life freely and with pleasure, with
furniture made for use; rooms where a drop of water spilled is not
fatal; where the life of a child is not made a burden to it by
unnecessary restraint; plain, simple, and ungarnished if necessary,
but honest. Let us have such ornament as we do have really
beautiful and wrought by hand, carving, wrought metal, embroidery,
painting, something which it has given pleasure to the producer to
create, and which shows this in every line—the only possible work of
art. Let us call in the artist, bid him leave his easel pictures, and
paint on our walls and over the chimney corner landscapes and
scenes which shall bring light and life into the room; which shall
speak of nature, purity, and truth; shall become part of the room, of
the walls on which they are painted, and of the lives of us who live
beside them; paintings which our children shall grow up to love, and
always connect with scenes of home with that vividness of a
memory from childhood which no time can efface. Then, if
necessary, let the rest of the walls go untouched in all the rich
variety of colour and tone, of light and shade, of the naked
brickwork. Let the floor go uncarpeted, and the wood unpainted,
that we may have time to think, and money with which to educate
our children to think also. Let us have rooms which once decorated
are always decorated, rooms fit to be homes in the fullest poetry of
the name; in which no artificiality need momentarily force us to feel
shame for things of which we know there is nothing to be ashamed:
rooms which can form backgrounds, fitting and dignified, at the time
and in our memories, for all those little scenes, those acts of
kindness and small duties, as well as the scenes of deep emotion
and trial, which make up the drama of our lives at home.
B. P.
R. U.
THE SMALLER MIDDLE CLASS
HOUSE.
A lecture delivered before an audience of architects in 1895.

N the class of house with which we are to deal to-

night, there are so many directions in which
improvement is needed, that it will only be
possible for me, in the space of one lecture, to
refer to a few of them, and to those specially
which will illustrate most suggestively the main
principles for which I contend: suggestively, in
the hope that some present will do me the honour of giving further
thought to what I shall touch upon, than is possible to them during
the length of time assigned to me this evening.
The influences which our common every-day surroundings have
upon our characters, our conceptions, our habits of thought and
conduct, are often very much underrated; we do not realise the
power they have of either aiding or hindering the development in us
of the best or worst of which we are capable.
Of the capacity the mere contour of a moulding has to bear the
impression of refinement or vulgarity, we, as architects, are fully
aware; but, I think, may not quite as fully realise the harmful
influence of imperfect and unspontaneous drawing, or ill-conception
in pattern design, or ill-assorted combinations of colour.
The thing of first consideration in designing a house is convenience,
workability. The plan is that which should be first thought of; so, in
our small middle class house, I will try to suggest one or two of the
improvements that seem to be most wanted in planning.
 First of all, for the sake of any who may be
here who are not architects, I will just point
out what is the most comfortable form of
room for a sitting room with respect to the
relative positions of the door, windows, and
fire. If your room must, of necessity, be
square or oblong (which should be the case
as seldom as possible), the form most
conducive to comfort, is of course this:
diagram 1. The second best arrangement,
(when this cannot be got) is to have the
door and fire both on the long wall, diagram
2. When the door is on the opposite wall to
the fire, you never feel to be able to get out
of the draught of it; and of course this kind
of thing, diagram 3, is too palpably bad to
need that anything should be said regarding
it.
One of the first defects we notice in the
plans of houses of the class we are speaking
of, as usually laid down, is that there are too
many rooms & all therefore necessarily too
small. In the larger middle class house there are generally drawing
room, dining room, library, kitchens, and offices, all tolerably good
rooms. Now, when a smaller house is wanted, the general custom
seems to be, to put exactly the same number of rooms, only
reducing all in size. Would it not be far better to reduce the number
of rooms, keeping such rooms as we do retain, large enough to be
healthy, comfortable, and habitable?
Are not many of the houses we know only too well, most distressing
in this respect, divided up, as they are, into a number of small
compartments, we cannot call them rooms, all far too small to be
healthy; too small to be really fit for human habitation. And what is
gained by this cramping? Only that there shall be one or more of
these compartments practically useless. In far the greater number of
these houses the third room is never used, or used merely because
it happens to be there, and its chief end seems to be to provide a
place for the women of the household to spend any spare time they
may have, cleaning down, dusting &c.
Now many people have a feeling that there is a certain cosiness in a
small room entirely unattainable in a large one; this is a mistake
altogether; quite the reverse has been my experience, which is that
such a sense of cosiness as can be got in the recesses of a large
room, can never be attained in a small one, be it no larger than a
sentry box. But if your big room is to be comfortable it must have
recesses. There is a great charm in a room broken up in plan, where
that slight feeling of mystery is given to it which arises when you
cannot see the whole room from any one point in which you are
likely to sit; when there is always something round the corner.
And what is made of the hall? Generally one of two things; either it
is a passage with a kind of step-ladder for a staircase and a hat
stand in it, with not room enough for you to hold the door and let a
friend out; or it is a great bare cold comfortless waste space, in the
centre of the house: instead of being, as it might, the most
comfortable and homely room, the centre of the common life of the
household.
Of course a hall of this kind needs some care in planning. In the first
place, the staircase must occupy exactly that position in which it can
be made an ornament and a pleasing feature in the room, all of
which it is quite capable of being, and a position in which it does not
detract from the cosiness, or give any unpleasant feeling of
draughtiness, or too great openness. In the second place, the doors
necessarily opening into a hall must be carefully so grouped that the
parts of the room in which anyone would sit, shall be out of the
draught of them as far as possible.
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.
I think we must not now go far into the faults in actual
draughtsmanship most common in our designs. But one thing is very
striking: our designers, almost without exception, seem to be out of
their depth directly anything in the way of foreshortening is required
of them; this cannot but lead us to the conclusion, that drawing from
Nature does not form a sufficiently important part of their training.
In fact I have myself known several men, engaged entirely in
drawing ornament, who never drew a bud or twig from Nature in
their lives. However this may be, the fact remains that very few of
our designers seem able to draw a leaf turning over with any truth
and accuracy.
Another cause of failure in our rooms is the dread of repeating
ourselves. With my wish that a more wholesome feeling in this may
spring up among all engaged in artistic work, I am perhaps more
anxious to have your sympathy than with anything which has gone
before. Let us then do nothing different from what we have done
before, until we feel it to be better than what we have done before.
Now this fear of repetition is no imaginary evil, but a very real and
living one. How often do we all attempt something fresh, knowing it
not to be the best we can do, (best I mean more in kind than
degree) simply from a weak dislike that people should say of us, that
we have only one style. How often do we turn out a design for a
certain purpose and position, knowing it to be not so good as one
we have before made for a similar purpose and position, simply
because we have not strength to repeat what we believe to be best,
lest people should think that is all we can do. In so doing we
preclude all possibility of development.
Now observe, this never occurs during the progress of any living art
in the past. The man who had carved one Early English capital did
not, when next he had a capital to carve, say, “I know nothing more
beautiful, but I must at any rate do something different, I must not
put the same capital here again.” On the contrary, his aim was to
carve a similar capital again, only he would try to do a better one;
for probably he had noticed some little point in which he could
improve on the last he did; some way in which he could mass his
light and shade so as to give them a more pleasing form when seen
at a distance; or some more lovely feeling it was possible to
introduce into the reveal of a leaf or the curve of a stem.