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A lecture delivered before an audience of architects in 1895.

In 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.

You must forgive me if I dwell on this a little. For it is of vital importance that all of us who have any hope or wish to see a living art again existent among us, should realise the full significance of this. There are many other changes which must take place in our practice of the arts, and these very radical changes, before living art is again possible to us; but if I can bring home to anyone, directly or indirectly, the full significance of this, I shall have done something towards this great end.

In excuse it may be and is said, “This aiming at change, variety, novelty, &c. is demanded of the designer by a capricious change-loving public, broadly speaking, incapable of any true judgment or appreciation of good and bad in art.” In reply to this, I think we cannot do better than recall what Mr. Ruskin says on this head. “You may like making money exceedingly; but if it come to a fair question, whether you are to make five hundred pounds less by this business, or to spoil your building, and you choose to spoil your building, there’s an end of you. So you may be as thirsty for fame as a cricket is for cream; but, if it come to a fair question, whether you are to please the mob, or do the thing as you know it ought to be done; and you can’t do both, and choose to please the mob,—its all over with you;—there’s no hope for you; nothing that you can do will ever be worth a man’s glance as he passes by.”

A further cause of failure in decorating and furnishing is virtually the same as we noticed when speaking of planning. When a small middle class house is wanted, what is usually done, we saw, is virtually to take a plan suitable for a larger house and reduce it every way, instead of designing a house suited to the new requirements. This same mistake is generally made in the decoration and furniture; instead of these being designed to suit the condition or circumstances in which they are to be placed, each designed for its position and purpose, and good and honest as far as it goes, what do we find? Cheapened imitations of the sort of thing common in the larger house, cheapened by being badly made, by veneer on pine instead of solid wood, by cast metals and ornament made to look like wrought, by machine carved wood, by marbled slate, &c. P.G. Hubert in his little book entitled “Liberty and a Living,” says: “One of my critics, for whom I have great personal deference, tells me that my theory of life tends to a relapse into barbarism, and in illustration of the truth of his position, he pointed one evening to a music stand near the piano with the remark: “With your ideas, that stand would never be made of mahogany and elaborately ornamented, but would be of pine, perhaps stained.”

“Well, suppose it was, I am inclined to think that the greater use of common material, stained pine and other cheap wood, in the houses of people of taste is a distinct indication of a needed reform. Take the little music stand in illustration. Its purpose is to hold a number of music books and loose sheets of music. It has three or four shelves, and is so made as to stand in a corner near the piano and take up but little room. It is made of mahogany, highly polished, & is ornamented, as most people would call it, with a sort of stucco-beading, which to me is distasteful. But it cost money, and therefore has its reasons for being in certain eyes. I have forgotten what it cost me—probably from fifteen to twenty dollars. Thanks to the growth of good taste, I can to-day pick out from half-a-dozen books I know of a little design for a music stand, or sketch it myself, and the nearest carpenter will make the thing in a day at a cost of two or three dollars for wood, labor, and staining. The result will be something which is pleasanter to my eye, and I will venture to say to the eyes of nine out of ten persons of educated taste. The other fifteen or sixteen dollars saved may be devoted to books, pictures, music—any of the things which really add something to life. The music stand of stained pine will do its work just as well as the one made of mahogany, inlaid with stucco beading—in fact it will do it better, for it will not need a periodic rubbing on the part of the parlour-maid to keep it bright and polished, and it can be moved about when occasion demands, as it weighs but little. It is as strong as the other, and it will last a hundred years.”

And now for the last cause of failure of which I shall speak, and this is: the very marked feeling which everything has of not having been designed for its place: the look everything has of being ready to move at any moment. Most things to look right and happy in their places must be designed for their places. The advantages attaching to a room furnished in this way, and largely by means of fixtures, I think the accompanying sketches will do something to illustrate.

There is a unity, completeness, comfort, and repose about such a room, which can never be got in a room in which the furniture &c. is not designed for its position and looking at home there, but is just temporarily stuck where it happens to stand, with a look of being on the alert, and ready to move on at a moment’s notice.

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.

How far things beautiful alone, are to be allowed place in our rooms I am not prepared to say. Thoreau, you will remember, threw away his fossil, the only ornament in his room, because it required dusting. While not suggesting that we should follow his example to such an extreme, I yet think that in retaining his spade and his axe he retained more of true decoration. And I believe in the main that the more adapted to its use anything is, the more graceful will it be in shape. The bent handle of the axe, more comfortable to hold, is also more beautiful than the straight, and in the degree the curve and form of the handle is adapted to its uses as an axe, by just so much the more beautiful it becomes.

The charm of the farmhouse kitchen, with everything in its place because of its usefulness, can of course be increased to an unlimited extent by making all the useful articles also beautiful in form, and harmonious in color. This is the line on which alone, I contend, a really beautiful room is to be got; and I would discourage all attempts at adornment by finding places for useless things.

I am glad to think that, owing to the great increase of education and employment among ladies, there will be less and less call for the old-fashioned drawing room; ladies will want a room to work in, not to dawdle in.

Pardon me if I seem to have dwelt over long on some of these difficulties in the way of designing really beautiful rooms. I have done so in the belief that they do not, as at first may appear, lie outside our province. For I believe, as professional men, we have just such power of influencing our clients by helping them towards a more natural life as the doctor has in such matters as diet; and particularly is this power evident in the domestic branch of the profession, with which we are dealing.

In building a man’s shell for him we certainly can influence very largely the life he will live within it; and while it is our duty to make that shell fit the life as well as possible, it is surely also our privilege to make it conduce to the realisation of the best of which he is capable.

In so far as we do this, we shall rise above the mere planner of houses and take our places in the work of planning and moulding the future life of the people.

BARRY PARKER.