Review - Book - The English House
- Published: 11 October 2007 17:15
- Last Updated: 11 October 2007 17:15
- Reader Responses
Norman Shaw was one of Muthesius’ heroes – pictured is his Leyswood at Groombridge, Sussex
BOOK
By Peter Davey
The English House.
By Hermann Muthesius.
Frances Lincoln, 2007. 768pp. £125
Leaving out our own times (too close for objective judgement) Britain has scarcely ever been a world leader in architecture, except at the turn of the 19th century, when the Arts and Crafts movement and the English Free Style influenced architects from Tokyo to Toronto. This achievement (at least in domestic architecture) was brilliantly celebrated by Hermann Muthesius, an architect and attaché in the German embassy here from 1896 to 1904.
Muthesius studied a huge range of British technology and design, but his main enthusiasm was for houses, as testified by his three-volume Das Englische Haus, published in Berlin in 1904-1905. From garden gate to soap dish, it systematically analysed late-19th-century developments historically, functionally, aesthetically and technologically.
Arts and Crafts houses like Baillie Scott’s Blackwell, Windermere impressed Muthesius with their naturalness and functionality
England was a strange and magical country for Muthesius because of its green landscapes, its individualism, its wealth, and its emphasis on houses rather than flats. He was a little troubled by the fact that the first blocks of leasehold flats had begun to appear in London, but hoped that they were a product of special circumstances. Compared to flats, ‘the most valuable gain from living in a private house is [the] closer contact with nature and the greater bodily and spiritual health which it brings’.
Muthesius’s book largely celebrates the great explosion of middle-class houses in the second half of the 19th century – but not entirely, for he does glance at company towns like Bournville and Port Sunlight and at the emergent Garden City movement, in which ‘social questions have been firmly linked to questions of art, and it must be said that this has been greatly to their advantage’.
After the historical and contemporary overviews of the first volume, the second concentrates on layout and nature of the principal spaces of house and garden, with detailed discussions of construction and sanitation (the latter, with its scientific drainage and constant hot water, was much admired by Muthesius). The third volume is largely devoted to interiors, furniture and fittings and offers many curious insights – for instance, that trouser creases, much admired on the continent and created there by pressing, were in England the result of laying clothes flat in drawers, rather than hanging them up. Tallboys to house the clothes were kept in a dressing room ‘always…attached to the master-bedroom in the English house’.
It is too easy to point to Muthesius’s class bias. All changes in architecture are started for people with money. Muthesius saw in the British domestic architecture of his time a freedom and individuality that must have seemed almost revolutionary in the rigid authoritarian ethos of Wilhelmine Germany. He loved the Arts and Crafts atmosphere of naturalness, friendliness and functionality in which ‘everything breathes simplicity, homeliness and rural freshness’ instead of, as in Art Nouveau, ‘a sham modernity expressing itself extravagantly in whimsical artificiality’.
The movement produced some of the most moving, innovative, practical and sensitive houses ever built, but when the book was published, the end was already in sight. Muthesius lamented Norman Shaw’s conversion to full Palladianism at Bryanston (1895), asking ‘what could have made the master return from the soaring flights of his imagination to the captivity of imitative design?’ He hoped the ‘retrogression’ was merely a swing of the pendulum, but within a year of publication of the third volume, Lutyens, hailed by Muthesius as leader of the younger generation, produced Heathcote, his full-blown Mannerist Doric manifesto near Ilkley.
The height of the movement was brilliant but brief. We are extraordinarily lucky that Muthesius recorded it with such love – and that publisher Frances Lincoln and editor Dennis Sharp have brought the book back to life in English with an excellent translation by Janet Seligman and Stewart Spencer. It has taken a century, but Muthesius has been thanked by the English at last.
