C. F. A. Voysey, The House That Jack Built, chintz, 1929
OF THE MANY ARCHITECTS WHO CREATED innovative houses and gardens during the Arts and Crafts era, C. F. A. Voysey and M. H. Baillie Scott stand out for their highly identifiable styles and fertile imaginations. The Studio hailed Baillie Scott as “one of the most individual architects of the present day,” and Voysey’s philosophy was set forth in a tract entitled Individuality.1 Early in their careers, their approaches to architecture and design were shaped by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. They furnished their houses with wallpapers, fabrics, and decorations of their own designs and provided appropriate gardens for them. Both architects appealed to middle-class clients with artistic leanings, such as artists, writers, and publishers. Baillie Scott had a longer, more successful career than Voysey, attracted an international following, and was able to adapt long after the Arts and Crafts Movement had been eclipsed. Voysey, whose ironclad principles never wavered, saw the demise of his architectural career when he failed to grasp the changes wrought by World War I. Today he is hailed for his imaginative houses and charming pattern designs that evoke the carefree, childlike world of a bygone era.
Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941) grew up in an unusual household in rural Yorkshire, where his father, the Reverend Charles Voysey, was expelled from the Church of England for questioning church doctrine. Voysey’s personal ideology, which suffused all his work, was an odd combination of the puritanism of John Wesley (one of his ancestors) and the Gothic revivalism of architect Augustus Welby Pugin. John Betjeman, the witty poet laureate and editor of The Architectural Review, wisely observed that Voysey interpreted in stone and color what the Reverend Voysey had preached.2 Voysey was articled for five years to the ecclesiastical architect John Pollard Seddon; his later experience in Devey’s office quickened his approach to domestic architecture. After he launched his own practice in the late 1880s, commissions were slow to materialize. He then turned to pattern design at the suggestion of Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, a well-known designer and founder of the Century Guild. Voysey continued to design wallpapers and textiles well into the 1930s, when, as a disillusioned and somewhat bitter man, these activities provided him with a source of income during lean years. In the 1890s, he built some of his best-known houses: Broadleys, Moor Crag, Greyfriars, and New Place.3
C. F. A. Voysey, The Orchard, Chorley Wood, Hertfordshire, line drawing (The Studio Special Number, 1901)
Known for his idiosyncratic architectural vocabulary of roughcast houses with low, projecting eaves, green slate roofs, and massive buttresses and chimneys, Voysey was one of the most original architects of the era. His houses were economical and efficient—his personal motto was “keep it simple.” As Baillie Scott wrote in 1907, just as Voysey’s career was beginning to fade, “If one were asked to sum up in a few words the scope and purposes of Mr. Voysey’s work, one might say that it consists mainly in the application of serenely sane, practical and rational ideas to home making.”4 Edwin Lutyens praised his originality, “the ‘hearted shutters,’ the client’s profile on a bracket, the absence of accepted forms, the long, sloping, slate-clad roofs, [and] white walls clear and clean! No detail was too small for Voysey’s volatile brain.”5 A caricature of one of his houses appears in his nursery chintz, The House That Jack Built, designed in 1929.
The Orchard, Voysey’s own modest house, best symbolizes his ideal home. “Untrammelled by the intervention of a client,” as one critic remarked, the architect did just as he pleased.6 Located in Chorleywood, in suburban Hertfordshire, it was within easy reach of his London office on the Metropolitan Railway line.7 The exterior is whitewashed roughcast, with towering chimneys and a green slate roof, while the interiors were predominantly white, with slate floors and turkey-red curtains. Voysey designed every detail, from the carpets and wallpapers to the furniture and the metal fittings on the doors. The overall impression was one of lightness, simplicity, and purpose. Only twenty feet (six meters) from the village road, the front door to the house was approached through a straight path bordered by yew hedges. The welcoming doorway, glimpsed through the hedges, had his signature heart-shaped letter box. Surrounded by a two-acre orchard filled with old apple trees, walnut trees, hollies, and a large cherry tree, The Orchard also had a flower garden filled with roses and birds, which dominate his wallpaper and textile patterns.
Fundamental to an appreciation of Voysey is his duality as an architect and a designer. As a fledgling architect, he presented himself as an artist, wearing clothing of his own design (such as cuffless trousers and jackets without lapels) and donning artistic-looking hats. In his architectural work, he adopted a limited palette of colors, primarily black, white, pale green, and deep red accents. An active member of the Art Workers’ Guild, Voysey frequently exhibited his wallpapers, textiles, metalwork, and furniture at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’s annual exhibitions in London. His evocative pattern designs and the quaint simplicity of his houses quickly caught the public’s attention. In an 1893 interview in The Studio, Voysey held the Morrisian line that artists should work in healthy environments and sweep ugliness away (although Voysey disliked Morris personally because of his atheism), but his theories about ornamentation were more specific. “The danger to-day lies in over-decoration,” he said; “we lack simplicity and have forgotten repose, and so the relative value of beautiful things is confounded.”8 Perhaps as a rationale for not building houses at the time, he observed that wallpaper could help disguise the ugliness of bad furnishings that he found so prevalent. Although he was an exceptional wallpaper designer, his preferred treatment for walls was, in fact, wood paneling, either stained or polished; in most of his houses, wallpaper was generally confined to the bedrooms.
Voysey’s patterns portray an imaginary world of birds, trees, animals, and flowers reduced to symbols, unlike Morris’s more flowing, detailed patterns. Some of Voysey’s designs reveal a darker side to his personality, with a recurring demon figure that also appears in his tiles, gate latches, and sundials, as well as menacing birds and other unsavory characters. His gargoyle depicting a demon was hailed for its “delightfully grotesque quality . . . suggestive of the medieval craftsman” by Jekyll and Weaver.9 Most of his patterns depict a happy world of songbirds, flowers, berries, and fruits, an idealized Garden of Eden, with columnar evergreens interspersed with fruit trees clipped into heart-shaped standards. The Squire’s Garden wallpaper is a medieval hortus conclusus enclosed by vine-covered trellises and ornamented with potted trees, trees clipped into pyramidal shapes, a dovecote, a sundial, peacocks, and garden birds.
Although Voysey is not known as a garden designer, he provided simple layouts for grounds and gardens in the course of his work, crossing paths with Gertrude Jekyll and Thomas Mawson, who designed gardens for several of his clients. Typically Voysey specified enclosure walls, usually roughcast, as well as garden houses, dovecotes, gates, sundials, and other components that harmonized with the style of the house. These were practical as well as ornamental features—especially dovecotes, which attracted the all-important birds into the garden.10
Watercolor perspectives of Voysey’s houses, some prepared by the architect himself, depict lush settings that blend simple flower gardens with more naturalistic areas. His perspective for Broadleys, for example, includes a small sunken garden on the south side of the house that exists today. Built in 1899 as a summer house for Helen and Arthur Currer Briggs of Leeds, Broadleys is an L-shaped roughcast house with three prominent bays overlooking Lake Windermere in the Lake District. At the turn of the twentieth century, this area of outstanding natural beauty, extolled in earlier years by William Wordsworth and John Ruskin, was ripe for development. The sunken garden at Broadleys, with a central sundial, stone paths, flower borders, and other typical Arts and Crafts features, may have been designed by Mawson, who was working nearby at Moor Crag at the same time. Today the steep incline to the lake is covered with naturalistic drifts of rhododendrons and other ornamental shrubs and trees that were typical of Mawson’s style.
For Oakhurst (now Ropes and Bollards), in Fernhurst, Sussex, Voysey chose a view of the house across a green Robinsonian meadow filled with carpets of scillas and daisies. The long, low house is atypical in form for Voysey, but replete with all his signature details. A stone wall along the embankment accommodates the grade change, while low, clipped hedges with topiaries mark the entrance to the garden. An arch in the back hedge takes its curve from the eyebrow recess over the garden gate and doorway. The cheerful garden inside the enclosure is filled with climbing roses, hollyhocks, and rose standards, all improbably blooming at the same time as the meadow flowers. The scarlet color serves to highlight the red curtains in the windows and the tile detailing on the house. The garden is a fantasy not unlike those depicted in Voysey’s wallpapers and textiles.
The garden at New Place, near Haslemere, Surrey, is a rare survival of one of his gardens. Designed in 1897 for Sir Algernon Methuen, founder of Methuen Publishing and an alpine fancier, the house and garden are considered one of Voysey’s most successful designs. “The mind and heart of the owner,” wrote one critic about New Place, “are plainly traceable in the perfect way in which the formal gardens next to the house gradually merge into the informal and wild parts further down the slope.”11 Voysey’s initial plan for the grounds carries the notations, “flowers big and tall,” “high yew and holly hedge,” “briars, blackthorns, and other wild shrubs,” and “wood left more or less wild.”12
The formal garden enclosures are arranged on four ascending levels to accommodate the steeply sloping site and enclosed with low brick walls. A sunken garden on the lowest level, adjoining the main drawing room, has junipers in each corner and a central sundial. The main garden borders, filled with Abutilon vitifolium and other perennials in soft shades of blue and cream, lead to a hedged enclosure with a sheltered seat. An arched opening in a hedge leads to a bowling green and arbor. Several thatched-roof summerhouses, designed to harmonize with the main house, are placed at axial points along the paths to afford both shelter and architectural interest in the garden.13 In all, it was a good, solid plan. In 1901, Lady Methuen asked Jekyll’s advice about turning one area into a rose garden, having disliked Voysey’s idea of waves of blue rue. Following a visit to New Place the next spring, Jekyll recommended dwarf rose bushes in each of four beds, with half-standards in the center of each.14 The gardens at New Place continued to evolve over the years, with the addition of a Japanese garden and water and rock gardens, but Voysey’s framework for the grounds has remained undisturbed.
At first glance, the early architecture of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865–1945) bears a strong resemblance to that of Voysey, with whitewashed stucco houses, exaggerated gables, and low, swooping rooflines. Like many architects of his generation, Baillie Scott was first exposed to Voysey in The Studio. Though not as well known or appreciated as Voysey is today, Baillie Scott ran a highly successful practice, specializing in suburban houses with richly decorated interiors. He shared Voysey’s disdain for the ugliness of Victorian era furnishings, but his interiors were more ornate than Voysey’s, with inlay panels and a range of furniture with intricate floral motifs, as well as wallpapers, textiles, metalwork, and stained glass.
Blackwell, located on the hillside above Broadleys in Bowness-on-Windermere, is one of his grandest houses and the most complete example of his work today. Designed in 1898 for Sir Edward Holt, a wealthy Manchester brewery owner, Blackwell was a holiday retreat with generous, yet informal, rooms for family gatherings. Similar to Voysey’s houses, Baillie Scott’s Blackwell responds to the local Lakeland vernacular, with roughcast whitewashed walls and steeply pitched slate roofs. At the same time, it is strikingly modern in appearance. Decorated throughout with furniture, tiles, wall coverings, carved woodwork, metalwork, wood carvings, and stained glass in floral motifs, Blackwell is a fitting tribute to the full capabilities of this pioneer of the Arts and Crafts Movement.15 On the exterior, the grounds that were originally laid out by Mawson in 1902 have long since disappeared, and the original plans no longer survive. Today a pleasant grass terrace surrounds the house. Blackwell is now a fully furnished museum of international significance.
Baillie Scott is a somewhat enigmatic figure, whose appearance resembled “an unassuming countryman,” as Betjeman described him, rather than an artist or a businessman.16 Born in Kent to an affluent family, he was originally slated for life as a farmer in Australia, where his family owned sheep ranches. After studying scientific farming at the Royal Agricultural College, he had a change of heart and decided to become an architect. In the 1880s he was articled to an architect in Bath before moving to the Isle of Man, where he practiced architecture for twelve years. He began experimenting with different styles, particularly Tudor half-timbering, and also came under the influence of the famed Manx silversmith, Archibald Knox, whose distinctive Celtic-inspired style resurfaces in Baillie Scott’s interior decorations.
The key to Baillie Scott’s successful career lies in his artistic approach to domestic architecture, coupled with his affinity for craftsmanship as exemplified at Blackwell. His early articles for The Studio, in which he spelled out the necessity for “simplicity and homely comfort,” brought him commissions in England and Europe, including one from Grand Duke Ernest-Ludwig of Hesse to redecorate the Ducal Palace in Darmstadt.17 In 1901, he also entered the famous House for an Art Lover competition that Charles Rennie Mackintosh had entered, winning a coveted prize. Few of his original drawings exist, as his Bedford office was destroyed by fire in 1919 and the London one suffered bomb damage in 1941. Fortunately, his book, Houses and Gardens, as well as his articles for The Studio provide a record of his work.
Baillie Scott was more articulate than Voysey and most other Arts and Crafts architects, with the exception of Robert Lorimer, on matters relating to garden design. The opening lines of his 1906 book acknowledge the importance of gardens. “One of the most prominent features in the literature of the last few years has been the garden book, and so numerous have these publications become that every one may learn how a garden should be formed and how maintained,” he wrote. “All the gardens described in these books are necessarily attached to houses, and the house as an appendage to the garden meets with a certain degree of attention.”18 This approach was certainly at odds with most architects of the time, who viewed the garden as an appendage of the house. By 1933, when he issued the second volume of his work, Baillie Scott’s ideas about gardens had matured. “Every architect is necessarily interested in the design of the garden which surrounds the house he has built, just as a painter is interested in the pattern of the frame for the picture he had painted,” he wrote. “The garden should, after all, constitute a kind of out-door extension of the building, and may consist of a number of open air apartments connected by corridors which in some cases link themselves with those of the house, so that the house and garden together form a complete arrangement of indoor and outdoor rooms.”19
Because Baillie Scott designed modestly scaled suburban houses, his ideas were most pertinent to the homeowner who could not afford elaborate upkeep. “The function of the garden is to grow fruit and vegetables for the household, and also to provide outdoor apartments for the use of the family in fine weather,” he stated simply. For a small garden, however, the stiff lines between the kitchen and pleasure gardens needed to be blurred. “The grey-green foliage and great thistle-like heads of the globe artichoke, the mimic forest of the asparagus bed, and the quaint inflorescence of the onion have each a distinctive beauty of their own which would be more widely recognized if these plants were not used for food,” he wrote. Some of his ideas, such as the incorporation of a small orchard (“the trees, once planted in grass, will require but little attention”) or a woodland copse (“demands absolutely no labour”), were somewhat naïve.20
For Heather Cottage, one of the houses featured in Houses and Gardens, he proposed blending the natural stands of heather with a formal garden near the house. “On sunny hills, where purple heather grows, purple heather shall be the dominant note,” he advised.21 The long, low white house, with a swooping red-tiled roof, sits comfortably in the heath, with hills of heather rising in the background. How different Baillie Scott’s perspectives, with their soft, romantic gardens, were from Voysey’s more dramatic views, with flowers reduced to decorative elements.
Baillie Scott’s recommendations for architectural features in his gardens, such as a seat or a summerhouse at the end of a vista, a dipping well for watering the garden, dovecotes (“a homely note”), and arbors and pergolas, were always practical. “A garden,” he wrote, “should be full of mystery, surprises, and light and shade. One of its most attractive features [is] the pergola, with its paved walk checkered by the shadows of the climbing plants which form its walls and roof.” At Heather Cottage, a long pergola serves to screen the drive from the lawn, providing an important architectural component.
Pergolas also serve to link the house with the garden, as seen in Baillie Scott’s rendering of the rose-laden chalk pergola at Undershaw, in Guildford (published in The Studio in 1909). The tile-roofed, half-timber and brick cottage with an informal flagged walk has sunken gardens on either side of the pergola, an excellent example of “open-air compartments connected by corridors.” The garden is awash with candybox groupings of delphiniums, lilies, lupines, dianthus, and other cottage-garden flowers. Echoing the words of Jekyll, whose books Baillie Scott considered infallible guides to garden planning, he advised massing flowers in informal clumps, planted so that “at each season of the year something is in bloom there, and in blooming forms a well-studied arrangement of colour.”22
M. H. Baillie Scott, Proposed House [Undershaw], Guildford, Surrey, perspective (The Studio, May 1909)
Unlike Voysey, Baillie Scott was equally at home restoring old manor houses or designing new houses. His evocative pastel rendering of the garden at St. Catherine’s Court, near Bath, shows a small terrace with twin pillars of yew and other Arts and Crafts elements. At Runton Old Hall, Baillie Scott collaborated with Jekyll, one of three projects he worked on with her.23 Jekyll’s introduction to Baillie Scott came in 1907, when he wrote to her on behalf of a client: “We are anxious to have some good perennial borders and a good selection of roses for a rose garden and pergola,” he wrote. “I have always had such a great appreciation of your books on gardening.”24 The following year, she assisted with the gardens at Runton Old Hall, located near the sea in Norfolk, where the manor house had suffered from recent disfigurements by a ruthless modern builder, according to Baillie Scott.25 He restored the flint-and-brick house, added a new wing, and planned a garden to complement the house. He devised a series of paved courts set with cobblestones in patterns, brick-and-flint walls to subdivide the garden into spaces and reduce the effect of the seaside winds, and archways for the main vistas. “The final touch to this garden scheme,” he wrote, “was added by Miss Jekyll, who arranged the flowers to secure well-thought-out schemes of colour at all seasons.” Even though Baillie Scott credited the client, Bertram Hawker, for his artistic sensibilities, Hawker rejected so many of Jekyll’s ideas that one plan marked “thrown out” betrays her irritation.26 Little survives of Jekyll’s plantings, but Baillie Scott’s thoughtful layout remains intact. The flint-and-brick archways and walls, as well as the patterned stone paths in the courts, provide an exceptional example of how a garden could be designed to relate to the house architecturally.
Snowshill Manor, an old Cotswold manor house in a tiny village near Broadway, in Gloucestershire, reveals Baillie Scott’s ingenuity in garden planning. Dating to 1500, with numerous later additions and dependencies, the manor house was desolate and surrounded by a sea of wilderness in 1919, when architect and antiquarian Charles Paget Wade rescued it, devoting much of his life to restoring the house and amassing a large collection of antiques, artifacts, and whimsies. Wade’s winning entry in a competition for a small garden organized by The Studio bears a striking resemblance to the arrangement at Snowshill, with a series of courts and long vistas.27 Until recently, it was assumed that Wade had designed those gardens, but plans have surfaced bearing Baillie Scott’s name.28 Most likely, Wade conceived the basic layout and Baillie Scott provided the technical expertise.
Wade and Baillie Scott successfully merged the different levels and outbuildings—the land slopes steeply to the south where the derelict farmyards once stood—into one cohesive unit with informal regularity. From the top terrace, one looks down on the various walled enclosures and across to the fields in the distance; from the Armillary Court below, one can glimpse the stone manor house through columnar yews. “The design was planned as a series of separate courts, sunny ones contrasting with shady ones and different courts for different moods,” Wade wrote. “The plan of the garden is more important than the flowers in it. Mystery is most valuable in garden design; never show all there is at once. Plan for enticing vistas with a hint of something beyond.”29
The dovecote and farm sheds that Wade had restored were skillfully tied into the plan so that each structure retained its individuality while complementing the others. Changing levels, vistas, and architectural features throughout give the garden its uniqueness. In addition to an armillary sphere, columns, a sundial, an ancient well, and all manner of statuary, Wade further embellished the garden with his favorite color, turquoise, which he thought a good foil for the green grass and foliage. In Wade’s day, Snowshill was an architect’s garden with little emphasis on flowers, but today it is filled with many beautiful plantings and is a splendid example of Baillie Scott’s planning principles.
