designed by Philip Webb and completed in 1860. It was described by Edward Burne-Jones as 'the beautifullest place on earth'.
If there is an answer to the predicament architecture finds itself in as it confronts wave after wave of technologies that threaten to make it irrelevant, it might be found in continuing to adopt the machine, whether it is a concrete mixer, the system of stud construction, a BIM program, or Midjourney in a manner that builds community. This movement has a name: Arts & Crafts. Romantic in its mid-19th-century origins and association, it has since evolved in many ways. Recrafting existing buildings; mass customization; organically blending architecture that grafts nature and the man-made together; self-made communities; maker labs and Etsy; and even some uses of AI are all outgrowths of the 19th-century idea. First articulated by John Ruskin, this concept suggest that we should make technology our own, break it apart, and use it to build new communities. And if Ruskin first outlined some of its ideas, it was a group of architects, painters, craftspeople, and entrepreneurs who built its first proof of concept, Red House, in Bexleyheath outside of London, between 1858 and 1860.
On a recent cold and rainy winter day, I ventured out there to see this founding site. It was not easy to get to Red House when Morris lived there and enticed his friends to help him make it into a creative lab, and it is still challenging to access. Even the convenience of the super-slick new Elizabeth Line means a long ride from Central London to the last stop in Abbey Wood, a half-hour bus ride winding through the suburbs, and then a walk to what is now an isolated villa in a sea of semi-detached rowhouses. The remove from the city center was an attraction to Morris, as he felt he could start his own community at this remove. But, as many exurbanites rediscovered during COVID, the exigencies of getting into town for a meeting, a bite or —what was more important—to see a client, was one of the main reasons why he sold Red House after only five years.
The house itself, which is now a National Trust property, is a rambling, brick-walled, and slate-roofed structure in a roughly U-shaped configuration. You enter the short side in a portico that recalls the entrance to a small English parish church, and the pointed arch here and elsewhere reminds you that Webb was working for the Neo-Gothic architect George Edmund Street when Morris, who also apprenticed at the firm, befriended him. Ruskin and later Arts & Crafts designers, including those who gathered at and around Red House, favored the style because they posited the Middle Ages as a period before industrialization in which people supposedly lived and worked together in small groups, imbued with faith and in touch with the surrounding landscape. Other followers of Ruskin and similar theoreticians emphasized the Catholic aspect of this vision, or focused on the importance of a rural idyll, but Morris and his group were most interested in the integration of nature, building, and crafted objects. Webb focused particularly on extending the notion of things built piece by piece, without an imposed plan.
Though there was a plan, and the Red House’s layout is recognizable as a standard villa, with bedrooms for Morris and his wife Janey, and their two children. On the ground floor, there is a gigantic dining room taking the place of the main living area —it was so large that the group of friends the Morris’s collected there often preferred to take their meals in the adjacent hallway. A small study, intended as an office, and a guest bedroom extended the short wing of the house, while the long side reached back to incorporate a service area where those people who actually did the work both lived and cooked. On the second floor, a “drawing room” or atelier sat above the dining area, and the three main bedrooms mixed with areas intended for artistic work by both Morris and his wife, and their guests. The layout itself was meant to accommodate and reflect an integration of life and creative work, as well as a changing cast of inhabitants or guests.Webb carried out the plan’s ramble in the way he designed the spaces. Hallways narrow and widen, arches highlighted in brick merge into white-washed walls, as if they were later additions, and windows open in rhythms that defy symmetry while taking on different geometries. Morris and his friends, including the painters Edward Burne-Jones, Elizabeth Siddal, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then set about filling in the rooms with all manner of built-in furnishings, from closets to stages, which they carved out of wood, painted, and covered with textiles. Morris developed his ideas for wallpaper patterns, which later became the core of the commercial workshops he set up as a continuation of Red House, on many of the surfaces. Medieval and early Renaissance motifs and images (the “Pre-Raphaelite” era from which the movement in painting Rossetti founded took its name) blend with flowers and plants.
It is all a bit of a jumble, and moving through the rooms is a process of discovery. That is even more the case now because, after the original inhabitants moved out in 1865, Red House was owned by a succession of occupants who treated what they had inherited with various degrees of care. Almost none of the original furniture survives, and many wall treatments were painted over. A particularly interesting era was the one before the National Trust acquired the property, when a modernist architect who worked for the local Council lived there and left a few pieces of his own, Mid Century Modern versions of Arts & Crafts furniture in place. To its credit, the Trust has preserved these pieces while engaging in acts of uncovering and even archaeological exploration of surfaces to recuperate as much of the original designs as possible. It is a miracle that the building has survived, and the Trust’s stewardship promises to continue to make it available for our study and enjoyment.
In its current state, this birthplace of the Arts & Crafts movement does not make the best case for itself. The building itself is a pleasantly picturesque composition, pushing and pulling into and out of the planted landscape, which has also been restored, but in the barren interiors only hints remain of the manner in which the original makers tried to create a completely immersive environment that would physically embody a better, self-made, collaborative world dedicated to and shaped by art and nature.That situation also reflects the failure of Red House as a social experiment. Although Morris had hoped Burne-Jones and his wife and others would join them there permanently, and Webb even designed an addition to accommodate the additional family, enticing the friends to leave London proved too difficult, while tensions and love affairs in the group also created rifts. What was more important, the firm Morris and Burne-Jones, along with Rossetti, Webb, and others had founded to extend the Arts & Crafts ideas became successful enough to demand their presence in the city. In the end, the realities of business took over, and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. became the makers’ focus. Some of its products (or wallpaper “inspired” by the original) are still manufactured by the English department store Liberty.
Visiting Red House made me wish I could step into a time machine to be part of the building of a home of and for craft, a place where people believed they could live in a new manner at the peak of the Industrial Revolution and develop an alternative to its “dark Satanic Mills,” as William Blake would have it. Blake said in the same poem, which has become a second English anthem (“Jerusalem,” 1810) that “I will not cease from Mental Fight/Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:/ Till we have built Jerusalem,/ In England’s green & pleasant Land.” Today, Red House is a ruin of that vision, but one worth taking a pilgrimage to so that you can see what dreams are still at the core of another, crafted version of architecture.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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