Modern roses in the grotto at Greenwood Gardens
THE BRITISH ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT had a dramatic impact on international design, thanks to its widespread exposure in magazines and books as well as the strong presence of its founding leaders. In America, architects and designers were swept away by the Cotswolds’ ideal of craftsmanship and the concept of integrated house and garden. Country Life in America, House and Garden, House Beautiful, and other home and garden publications regularly featured the work of British architects. In the early 1900s, when large Beaux-Arts estates were proliferating across the country, a dedicated group of architects and designers began heralding smaller, simpler houses with intimately scaled, naturalistic gardens. Built with indigenous materials with regional variations, these houses and their ancillary garden structures embraced the Arts and Crafts Movement’s aesthetic of rusticity and the vernacular.
The American Arts and Crafts Movement reflected the country’s melting pot of nationalities and its diverse geography, typically developing symbiotic relationships with firmly established regional traditions. In the Northeast and the South, it attached itself to the deeply entrenched Colonial Revival Movement, which harked back to colonial America, with clapboard houses and romantic, old-fashioned gardens and quaint garden furnishings. In the Midwest, it was linked to the Prairie School, notably in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers, and landscape architects such as Jens Jensen and Ossian Cole Simonds, who embraced William Robinson’s call for wild gardening with native plants.1 In California, where the Bungalow style reigned as the ideal Arts and Crafts home, naturalistic gardens with native plants were more appropriate than formal, English-style gardens.
Although these are only broad generalizations, the American movement was dissipated, and few houses and gardens could rival those in Britain. The Arts and Crafts Movement had a greater impact on architecture and its allied arts than it did on garden design, where its influence surfaced in details rather than overall concept. In Boston, Chicago, New York, and California, the primary hubs of the movement, Arts and Crafts communities sprang up to carry on William Morris’s call for artistic reform and joy in manual work. As a result, the American Arts and Crafts Movement has come to be identified with simple oak furniture, decorative pottery and tiles, textiles, book arts, and metalwork, as well as distinctive regional architecture. One of the realms in which the American movement outshone its British mentors was in art pottery, where Rookwood, Grueby, Newcomb, Paul Revere, Batchelder, and other potteries specialized in soft, subtle glazes and simplified floral and landscape motifs. On the other end of the spectrum, Tiffany Studios became synonymous with dazzling, three-dimensional stained-glass panels and lampshades decorated with wisteria, irises, and other flowers in heavenly garden settings.
In 1906, an American writer observed that the Arts and Crafts Movement “had been necessarily somewhat slow in this country, as many have opposed its teachings. However, the strong personality of a few craftsmen has, by protest and example, shown the value of beauty of form and finish.”2 One of those strong personalities was Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915), whose Roycroft community in East Aurora, New York, was founded in direct response to Morris’s example. A former soap salesman, Hubbard realized his dream to found a craft enterprise on the premise that “life without industry is guilt—industry without art is brutality.” From 1895 on, the renowned Roycroft Press produced publications ranging from utilitarian tracts such as The Philistine and Little Journeys to hand-printed volumes illustrated by the famed book designer Dard Hunter. In its heyday, Hubbard employed more than 200 artisans, or Roycrofters, who produced hand-hammered metalwork, hand-printed books, and hand-built furniture in the Roycroft shops that were sold nationwide. After Hubbard’s death in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, Roycroft was taken over by his son, but it foundered shortly thereafter when the appeal of such products had greatly diminished.
Gustav Stickley (1858–1942), often regarded as the “American William Morris,” had an overwhelming influence on middle-class American homeowners through The Craftsman magazine, which reached households from coast to coast between 1901 and 1916, the peak years of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The Craftsman extolled the work of English architects and helped translate their ideas into an American Craftsman style. Stickley also offered a line of Craftsman Homes, or inexpensive model bungalows, with regional variations from California Mission style to a mountain camp or a half-timbered cement cottage. A furniture maker, metalworker, and stone mason himself, Stickley founded a furniture workshop in Syracuse, New York, after meeting C. F. A. Voysey and C. R. Ashbee in England in 1898. Like many American artisans and architects, he subscribed to The International Studio, which acquainted him with Voysey, M. H. Baillie Scott, and Ashbee, and the Guild of Handicraft became a personal inspiration for him.
In 1908, Stickley embarked on Craftsman Farms, a cooperative communal venture located in northern New Jersey, joining the ranks of “American artists, reformers, writers, and architects who were seeking to remake the world,” according to his biographer Mark Alan Hewitt.3 Stickley’s utopian community embodied many of the ideals of the American Arts and Crafts Movement—in particular, the virtues of the simple life, manual labor in crafts, and the nurturing of the unspoiled rural countryside—but it went bankrupt in 1915. It was here that Stickley manufactured his distinctive oak furniture for sale in showrooms in New York City. At Craftsman Farms, he constructed a rustic house from chestnut logs gathered on the property, with a clay tile roof and a huge stone chimney. The living room, which one writer dubbed “nobly barbaric” for its massive rough-hewn posts, was furnished with products made in the workshops, and the color scheme ran to somber browns, greens, and gold.4 Naturalistically planted boxwood, arborvitae, and barberry blended harmoniously with the log house in its rural hillside setting, and vineyards, peach and apple orchards, beds filled with gaily colored cosmos and petunias, and vegetable gardens provided a sense of self-sufficiency.
The pages of The Craftsman promoted the natural garden as opposed to what Stickley termed “the rich man’s garden, ostentatious, spectacular, sumptuous.”5 The house, he said, should be set in the midst of the garden.
Let garden and house float together in one harmonious whole, the one finding completion in the other. . . . A garden must be spontaneous—allowed to spring from the ground in a natural way—otherwise it is devoid of that irresistible something called style, for style is born of the shaping of use and beauty to environment. . . . Let your garden look as if it had grown of its own accord, as if Nature herself had been your architect, your landscape gardener, your designer in chief.6
In an ideal garden, no one should be able to tell where the house ends and the gardens begin. Pergolas, he advised, were an ideal connection between the house and the healthful outdoors; they served gracefully to screen unattractive buildings, lead visitors from one area to the next, and provide outdoor living spaces and pleasant retreats. Stickley’s advice was far-ranging in defining the Craftsman style of gardens.
Not far from Craftsman Farms, Baillie Scott designed The Close, a half-timbered courtyard house in Short Hills, New Jersey, in 1912.7 A well-heeled community within commuting distance to New York City, Short Hills in the 1910s and 1920s thrived on grand houses and gardens that Stickley would have dismissed as the “rich man’s garden.” The client, Henry Binsse, had spotted the article about Baillie Scott’s work at Runton Old Hall in House Beautiful in 1911 and decided he wanted something of an old English inn for his own house.8 It could not have been more different from Craftsman Farms, with its pale rose–colored stucco façade, half-timbering, leaded glass casement windows, and decorative lead rainwater heads. The Close is enclosed by low stucco walls, with a garden house next to the gated entry drive. The interior courtyard has simple flower borders, with a more formal treatment at the main entrance; elaborate English-style flower gardens once stood to one side of the house.
It is hard to know what Stickley might have thought of Pleasant Days, the Short Hills home of New York real-estate mogul Joseph P. Day. Now known as Greenwood Gardens, the surviving grounds provide an excellent example of regional Arts and Crafts sensibilities. The fanciful twenty-eight–room stucco mansion was designed around 1911 by William Whetten Renwick (1864–1933), a nephew of the famous Gothic Revival architect, James Renwick, Jr. William Renwick was not only a talented architect, but also a sculptor and painter who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The exterior and interiors of Pleasant Days as well as the garden were enhanced with his innovative polychrome fresco-relief panels and custom-made Rookwood tiles. Renwick’s distinctive metope-like bas-relief panels decorated the exterior of the once-amazing house with its distinctive undulating gray-green whaleback slate roof. The whole house was alive with decorative birds and flowers, bringing the pleasures of the summer gardens indoors.
M. H. Baillie Scott, House [The Close] at Short Hills, New Jersey (Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art, 1914)
William Whetten Renwick, House and Garden at Pleasant Days [Greenwood Gardens], Short Hills, New Jersey, ca. 1924
The surviving garden structures, including a rustic stone teahouse and summerhouse, in addition to the foundation walls, water cascade, and other features, still retain their Arts and Crafts decorations. The formal gardens on the south side of the house consist of a series of grass terraces with ornamental pools and fountain figures. The Garden of the Gods is framed by a semicircular pergola enclosed by openwork trellises and polychrome herms on pedestals. Other pergolas serve to connect the house with the garden and provide pleasant walkways. Day’s fortune vanished during the Great Depression, and years later the crumbling house was torn down and replace with a smaller, more conventional house. The surviving gardens are an extraordinary example of the diversity and ingenuity of individual Arts and Crafts designers.9
Chicago was an unusually fertile area for the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Not only was it home to the Prairie School of architecture, but also the prestigious architectural publication House Beautiful, whose first issue in 1896 featured the work of Voysey and Ashbee. The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, one of the oldest in the country, was established in 1897 at Jane Addams’s Hull House. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who was among the charter members, delivered his famous lecture, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” there in 1901. The society’s annual exhibitions of members’ work fueled many industries, such as pottery, textiles, bookbinding, jewelry, and metalwork. Ashbee’s link to Chicago began in 1898, when some of his jewelry was exhibited in one of the society’s exhibitions, and he personally came to Chicago two years later, the first of several trips to America.10
Chicago was especially renowned for its architecture, which dramatically shifted in focus from Beaux-Arts, as exemplified at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, to a new agenda as devised by Wright, whose organic approach to design revolutionized the American home. Wright, who was unusually verbose about his personal life and architectural goals, was in many ways a disciple of Morris. He sought harmony between architecture and the natural landscape and even recommended Gertrude Jekyll’s book Home and Garden for its special approach to homebuilding (“It should be in every library”).11 Evocative renderings by Marion Mahoney Griffin of his early houses include lush, stylized landscapes, with swags of wisteria framing the all-important views to his buildings. Wright-designed planters overflow with trailing vines that accentuate the long, low lines of his Prairie style houses, such as the 1908 Robie House in Chicago. His compounds at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Taliesin West in the Arizona desert were founded on principles deriving from the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Wright was not known for collaborating with landscape architects, but at the request of his clients, Darwin and Isabelle Martin, Ellen Shipman was invited to provide additional design input for the couple’s lakeside house near Buffalo, New York. Wright designed Graycliff in 1928–29, a volatile time for wealthy industrialists, many of whom lost their fortunes during the Great Depression. His initial designs for the grounds included sketches for the dramatic entrance water garden, which Shipman later modified, and other landscape features that she removed. The Martins’ decision to hire Shipman was based on her renown as a landscape architect. Her design scheme specified groups of trees and shrubs around the forecourt, a naturalistic evergreen garden filled with swaths of lilies, an intricate flower garden, and other areas of the steep lakefront property that rose seventy feet (twenty-one meters) above Lake Erie. In the end, Wright’s low, sweeping house in his later period Prairie-style architecture was beautifully complemented by Shipman’s landscape. It is an excellent example of how American designers embraced the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement while respecting regional aesthetics and traditions.
Other, less famous Chicago architects were also influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869–1926), who designed country houses in Lake Forest and other fashionable suburbs ringing Chicago, was a devoted Anglophile and conversant with his British contemporaries. Ragdale, Shaw’s summer house and country retreat for his growing family, is located in a once-rural farm property with an old apple orchard and views to acres of meadows. Today it is hailed as “one of the finest examples of Arts and Crafts architecture in America, because it has remained untouched and is well preserved.”12 The twin-gabled white stucco house, with low, sweeping roofs and wood shutters with heart motifs, bears a striking resemblance to Voysey’s own house, The Orchard, built the following year. The interior is unpainted oak, with light and airy rooms, inglenooks, and fireplaces; the dining room was once papered with one of Voysey’s patterns. Porches around the house link it with the gardens and the distant meadows.
In comparison with Shaw’s more classically inspired gardens, Ragdale is more homespun and personal. Over the years, he and his family enhanced the grounds with kitchen and vegetable gardens, flower gardens, a bowling green, and an outdoor theatre, known as the Ragdale Ring, where audiences watched performances by his wife, Frances Wells Shaw.13 The pleasant flower garden has cross-axial paths, a flourishing grape arbor, a wellhead, and an English-inspired dovecote at one end. At the center of the garden enclosure, a sundial, designed by Shaw, is inscribed “Hours Fly. Flowers Die. New Ways. New Days. Pass By. Love Stays.” Shaw’s garden planning at Ragdale fits within the parameters laid down by Morris and Robinson, with its essential combination of work and leisure and its harmonious link with nature, where informal lanes rambled through the woods to the meadows beyond.14
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, is a design mecca that extends into the Modern Movement. The founding of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 1920s marked the beginning of an essential moment in American architecture and decorative arts. The campus was designed by Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950), who brought his extensive experience in the Arts and Crafts Movement in Finland to the United States. Saarinen House, which was completed in 1930 and now serves as the home for the academy’s president, is furnished throughout with Saarinen’s designs. The courtyard garden, designed by C. Deforest Platt, was filled with roses and other climbers as well as ornamental shrubs.15 Cranbrook would never have been founded without the visionaries Ellen and George Booth, whose interest in landscape gardening and involvement with the American Arts and Crafts Movement made the project happen. Their residence, Cranbrook House, was built in 1908 by noted Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Built in an English Tudor style, the design was inspired by British Arts and Crafts architecture. The Booths commissioned the furnishings from American and European workshops. The extensive naturalistic gardens were laid out by Ossian Cole Simonds (1855–1931), a well-known regional landscape architect and the author of Landscape Gardening (1920). The landscape includes a number of features, but of interest are the Arts and Crafts–inspired herb garden and walled garden as well as rustic bridges and summerhouses.
In California, the American Arts and Crafts Movement found its greatest fulfillment. The land of golden opportunity, California is renowned for its delightful climate and the promise of healthful living. Wealthy industrialists looking for vacation homes and artists alike were attracted to the sweeping views of mountains, the sparkling sunshine, and fresh air that were in short supply in large cities such as Chicago, Boston, and New York. The climate varied considerably, from hot and desertlike in the south to cool and moist in the San Francisco Bay Area. In architecture, the Spanish influence prevailed, with its indigenous adobe Mission architecture, coupled with the outdoor lifestyle brought by Mexican settlers. Mission Revival houses and gardens were to California what the Colonial Revival was to the Northeast. Gardens are ideally suited to the West Coast, where the Mediterranean climate lends itself to outdoor living, with terraces and courtyards. Walled enclosures surrounding the house range from a simple courtyard to a series of garden rooms, each with a different theme. The English influence was not a strong consideration in California, where gardens tended to be informal. Californians also had a special bond with nature and a wonderful palette of plants both native and imported.
California also had its fair share of visionaries, such as Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928), whose passion for California missions and Spanish culture in general led him to build an extraordinary house, El Alisal (The Place of Sycamores), in Pasadena in 1898. Constructed from round boulders collected from the Arroyo Seco, the house overlooked a true Robinsonian wildflower meadow. In that same year in Berkeley, the poet Charles Augustus Keeler formed the Hillside Club, an improvement society aimed at transforming the Berkeley hills into a lush, naturalistic landscape. Keeler teamed up with architect Bernard R. Maybeck (1862–1957) to build his own house, which he hoped his neighbors would emulate. Keeler’s 1904 book, The Simple Home, became somewhat of a bible for his ideas regarding housing design. About gardens, he wrote, “My own preference for a garden for the simple home is a compromise between the natural and formal types—a compromise in which the carefully studied plan is concealed by a touch of careless grace that makes it appear as if nature had unconsciously made bowers and paths and sheltering hedges.”16 Maybeck was known for his highly original structures in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in Berkeley, which were built from local materials. His hallmark wisteria-covered trellises merge imperceptibly with the timber-framed buildings.
California’s distinctive architecture was formulated around the California bungalow, which featured porches, terraces, and outdoor spaces. A number of architects left their marks on the California landscape, but none more so than Charles Sumner Greene (1868–1957) and his brother, Henry Mather Greene (1870–1954). In many ways, Greene and Greene were comparable to the Barnsley brothers in England, as they were both architects and woodworkers. Born in Ohio and educated in manual arts in St. Louis, they studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and later apprenticed with Boston architects. Upon opening their first office in Pasadena in 1894, they created some of the most brilliant examples of Arts and Crafts architecture in the country, demonstrating their exquisite workmanship, detailing, and planning. Rejecting the prevailing Beaux-Arts approach to design, they were particularly influenced by the simplicity of Japanese architecture and furniture.17
Charles Sumner Greene traveled to Britain in 1901, where he was exposed to the Arts and Crafts Movement, visiting, among other places, the Glasgow International Exhibition where Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work was displayed. Regular subscribers to The Craftsman magazine, the brothers began designing furnishings for their architectural commissions in 1904. After visiting Charles’s workshops in 1909, C. R. Ashbee wrote, “I think C. Sumner Greene’s work beautiful; among the best there is in this country . . . beautiful cabinets and chairs [executed with] a supreme feeling for the material, quite up to our best English craftsmanship.”18
The David B. Gamble House in Pasadena, designed in 1908, features exquisite detailing both inside and out, sensitive grading, and Japanese-inspired landscaping. As Henry recalled, “we were able to do our best design when we could control a complete landscape and then decorate it, as well as the house. This is the only possible way to achieve integration of all three.”19 The terraces, which function as outdoor living spaces, hug the low, cantilevered house on three sides, under a canopy of California live oaks (Quercus agrifolia). Live oaks figure in Charles’s magnificent teak-framed front door with its iridescent glass panels that were executed by local craftsmen. The interior is fully furnished with Greene and Greene furniture, paneling, and lighting fixtures. The Blacker House, designed in 1907 and also located in Pasadena, is noted for its Japanese-inspired garden that melds beautifully with the architecture. Charles commented, “fine gardens are like fine pictures, only it may take longer to paint them with nature’s brush.”20
Green Gables in Woodside is Charles Sumner Greene’s masterpiece of landscape architecture. Designed for Mortimer Fleishhacker in 1911, the long, low house is sited in the midst of seventy-five acres of rolling meadow dotted with live oaks and views to the Santa Cruz Mountains. Charles, who envisioned the garden as a series of living rooms for the house, created terraces and reflecting pools to capitalize on the expansive views. In 1926 he designed a spectacular water garden in a problematic area where the site dropped off dramatically. His brilliant 300-foot-long (91 meters) pool terminates in a series of stone arches reminiscent of a Roman aqueduct. The garden, in fact, quotes many sites in Italy, England, and America. Looking back to the house from the lower garden, one sees a rustic stone grotto nestled between the massive horseshoe staircases ascending to the upper terrace. The lower garden is constructed in a warm-toned stone in a vernacular style of craftsmanship. The skillful planting of native and imported plants with strong architectural interest complements the rustic stonework in the staircases and paths. David C. Streatfield, the preeminent scholar of California gardens, believes that Green Gables is the largest garden in the country by an Arts and Crafts designer.21 It is certainly one of the most significant and remains unchanged today.
