BY THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY bungalows had come to represent an idealised vision of the simple life. But being close to nature was not just the dream of self-confessed bohemians, weekenders or ‘back-to-the-landers’. Their fashionable status as second homes of the rich and famous gave bungalows an aspirational appeal that was increasingly exploited for marketing purposes. Manufacturers directed new products specifically at bungalow owners, their advertising copy helping, in its turn, to increase demand. Bungalows came to be seen as the perfect dwelling for a time of social transition, a labour-saving home that could be run without servants, whether as a weekend and holiday residence, or as a permanent home.
Since its arrival in Britain, the bungalow had punctuated the public consciousness in various ways. Portrayals of an Indian bungalow appeared on the London stage from at least 1875, when the first English production of Around the World in Eighty Days featured that exotic setting. Two years later came a new musical called A Happy Bungalow and in 1886 the Avenue Theatre’s ‘burlesque pantomime’ of Robinson Crusoe presented audiences with the set of ‘Crusoe’s bungalow (a study in bamboo)’. The link to such archetypes of isolated self-sufficiency was to be repeated over the years. A 1907 guidebook described how Dawlish Warren, a sandspit at the mouth of the River Exe in Devon, was being colonised:
... now the red roofs of bungalows are beginning to plentifully dot the wastes; and to play at Robinson Crusoe, with twentieth-century embellishments and more or less luxurious fringes, has become a favourite pastime on this once solitary haunt of the heron, the wild duck and the sea-mew.
By this date the bungalow’s Indian origins were less relevant than its perceived rustic charm, and during the next decade there was a flurry of music-hall songs emphasising the romance of home-grown bungalows. Titles included ‘Rosy’s cosy bungalow’ (1906), ‘Won’t you come and share my bungalow?’ (1908) and ‘I’ll build a bungalow of love’ (1916).
The bungalow in fiction. Joan, Betty and Mollie have adventures while roughing it in a country bungalow. Though these girls from good homes enjoy their freedom, after saving the day they happily relocate to the more conventional local manor house.
Supporting this blissful bungalow image was a growing body of technical and design literature that discussed such practicalities as site specifications, planning and drainage, the use of materials and acceptable ornament. The Building News had taken an early interest in Taylor and Seddon’s Thanet bungalows and returned to give them detailed critiques in 1895, then again in a series of twenty-seven articles published throughout 1905–6. The same journal also ran competitions through its ‘Designing Club’, encouraging architects to grapple with the particular requirements of a hillside, riverside or weekend bungalow. Commenting on entries submitted in 1898 for the first of these, intended as the summer residence of a gentleman, The Building News proclaimed that ‘the chances for artistic originality are unfettered, provided all attempt at a monumental style of building is avoided, and the suitability of simplicity is acknowledged’. The continually stressed virtue of simplicity chimed perfectly with the Arts and Crafts ethic of The Studio magazine, another key source of design ideas, which illustrated bungalows by architects including R. A. Briggs and H. M. Baillie Scott.
This bungalow at Mildenhall, Suffolk, is probably the kind imagined in the opening line of M. F. Hutchinson’s book: ‘A quaint little bungalow, with a verandah, stood in the middle of a field.’ The fictional one was built by ‘the mad artist’.
Oetzmann’s weekend bungalow was seen by thousands of exhibition goers from 1908 to 1911 and its image was reproduced in books and on postcards. It cost £200–230 for a living room, three bedrooms, hall and kitchen.
An affordable model bungalow demonstrating this ideal was set up by Oetzmann’s department store for the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908, remaining at the White City in London during the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition and the 1911 Coronation Exhibition. Its brick structure, roughcast in white under a red-tiled roof, with green paintwork and latticed porch complete with Arts and Crafts heart motif, would not have looked out of place in Letchworth Garden City. The impetus here, however, was avowedly commercial, and the popularity of exhibitions at this time led other companies to present their products to the public in this way. The makers of a wood stain called Solignum erected two-storey bungalows treated with their product at the Builders’ Exhibition at Olympia and the 1911 Festival of Empire Exhibition at Crystal Palace. With the vibrant market in prefabricated structures and the increasing visibility of bungalows in the landscape, as well as in popular culture, there was a sense that the bungalow had gained a momentum all of its own. As Harry Bryant Newbold wryly noted in the early 1920s, the bungalow ‘has grown to mean in the popular mind almost anything from a cottage to a mansion – so long only as it be what is vaguely qualified as picturesque, in fact ... [give it] a rose-covered porch, and you are well on the way towards a bungalow ...’
The fashionable status of bungalows meant they were an ideal vehicle for publicising specialist products such as ‘Mayresco’ paint. Note the rustic verandah posts and fencing on this Hornsea bungalow designed by W. E. Warburton.
An example of the over-elaboration criticised by R. Randal Phillips, who wrote of bungalows ‘made banal with embellishments’ or ‘worried with “features” ... dotted about with bits of carving, coloured glass and flower baskets ... until one begins to deplore the whole genus ...’
Architects could be scathing about bungalows but they could not afford to ignore the strong post-war demand. In The Book of Bungalows (1920, updated 1922) R. Randal Phillips stated that the great majority of existing bungalows were over-ornamented like ‘architectural Turkish Delight’. Newbold said much the same in his book on House and Cottage Construction, admitting that ‘amongst those skilled in design the word “bungalow” has grown to be synonymous with all that is ugly and offensive ...’ Importantly, he added ‘This need not be the case.’ They and other writers sought to redirect attention to the old Arts and Crafts message of simplicity, offering guidance and describing examples of tasteful bungalows in a bid to reclaim lost ground.
To this end, a positive step was taken in 1922 when the Daily Mail launched an architectural competition prompted by an excess of bungalow-related ‘Letters to the Editor’. Of 768 designs submitted, the fifty best were published in The Daily Mail Bungalow Book, along with a supplement based on the ‘Bungalow Town’ section of the 1923 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. The emphasis was on cost-efficient permanent homes that were single-storey and thus labour-saving. Less work for servants had always been part of the bungalow sales pitch, but after the First World War women had more plentiful employment options and the number entering domestic service fell rapidly. The ‘servant problem’ was felt particularly by the middle class, to whom Randal Phillips addressed his publication – ‘that middle class upon whose shoulders every new burden is thrust. The middle class have to shift for themselves in the matter of housing, and many are turning to the bungalow as a hopeful solution of their difficulties.’ It was not, as Harmsworth’s Household Encyclopaedia pointed out, that bungalows were cheaper to construct. Compared with a traditional two-storey cottage, a bungalow was 9 per cent more expensive because the lack of passages and stairs was offset by double the ground area and a larger perimeter. The dividends were in the daily saving of labour, and the best model in terms of planning and modern features was to be found in California, where the lack of servants had necessitated innovations not seen in the old Indian exemplar.
These early-twentieth-century bungalows at Prestatyn on the North Wales coast achieved the sort of Arts and Crafts-inspired simplicity that was advocated by architectural commentators well into the 1920s.
This 1920s bungalow was praised for its simple elevation and a plan that separated service quarters from sleeping rooms either side of a central hall. Contemporary writers recommended thatch whilst conceding that skilled thatchers were hard to find.
Writers on bungalows from Briggs onwards were universally agreed about the need for good planning and the two main forms this could take. There was the central hall/living room option, which was most common in the United States, particularly where the climate made verandahs a viable means of communication between rooms. The alternative, commoner in Britain, was to have rooms off a passage or corridor. Poor light and wasted space were the typical disadvantages of this plan but writers in the 1920s still retained a very Victorian concern for privacy. If a servant-free home was the new reality, concerns about keeping a private sitting room suggest the mental transition was an ongoing one. All accepted that one floor was easier to clean than two, and the potential to choose up-to-date fittings contributed to the bungalow’s modernity. A new cooking stove should replace the traditional range – there was even one on the market called the ‘Bungalow’ cooker – while a kitchen cabinet offered the latest thing in labour-saving storage. A serving hatch between kitchen and dining area was also highly recommended.
Labour-saving bungalows replaced dirty and inefficient coal fires with modern gas or electric power. Belling’s ‘Bungalow Heater’ was designed to appeal directly to this new inter-war market of owners and would-be owners of bungalows.
The owners of this inter-war prefab were obviously very proud of it because they took an album-full of photographs of its exterior and interior. Unfortunately, they did not think to write down its location for posterity.
Advice on interior design repeated the mantra of simplicity although Randal Phillips glibly cautioned against filling the country bungalow ‘with furniture that belongs to the yokel’s cottage and the tap room of an inn’. When The Building News chose bungalow furniture as a challenge for its ‘Designing Club’ in 1898, the brief specified oak, handled with the plain character of a joiner’s rather than a cabinet-maker’s work. This emphasis on traditional yet ‘artistic’ design was displayed in Oetzmann’s exhibition bungalow, whose entire contents – from brown wood furniture to bedding, egg cups and scrubbing brushes – could be bought as a package for 45 guineas. Other department stores, such as Heal’s, Waring’s and Whiteley’s, offered specific bungalow furniture, and in 1923 Drage’s of High Holborn advertised a hire purchase scheme to ‘furnish a summer residence’ that began with the following conversation:
Mr Everyman: Reading your advertisements put an idea into our heads to fulfil an old dream of furnishing a bungalow in the country.
Mr Drage: Our business really is to make such dreams come true, and quickly; so I’m delighted to serve you. Did you see what you wanted in our showrooms?
Mrs Everyman: Yes, everything we needed, and just to our taste.
A view of the living room in the prefab (page 41, bottom). The simple wooden furniture stands on patterned linoleum, and fresh flowers are used for decoration. A lady’s face can be glimpsed in the circular mirror above the sideboard.
In truth, ‘Mr and Mrs Everyman’ had to be firmly middle-class to make their dream a reality in this way but such marketing nonetheless helped enhance the desirability of bungalow life.
‘Painted bedroom furniture for the bungalow’ by Heal & Son of Tottenham Court Road, London. This simply decorated suite was illustrated as an exemplar of good taste in The Book of Bungalows by R. Randal Phillips (1922).
‘Give your Bungalow a Present’ said The Needlewoman in July 1929, its cover showing two fashionable young ladies relaxing on a verandah. Inside were instructions for a matching blue gingham bedspread and duchesse set perfect for the ‘bungalow-proud’ housewife.
The 1920s Bungalow Footwarmer featured an archetypal bungalow of the period with pyramid roof. It was shown detached in a rural setting, complete with water butt, for collecting rain where there was no more sophisticated supply.
A combination of Arts and Crafts rhetoric and imagined rural rusticity ensured that the 1920s bungalow was relatively conservative in design, establishing a suburban archetype for the rest of the twentieth century. Yet the concept of leisure changed during the inter-war period and Ella Carter’s 1937 book Seaside Houses and Bungalows shows there were holiday homes that sought to embrace the clean lines of European Modernism, seen in lidos and entertainment venues such as the De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. At young resorts such as Frinton-on-Sea in Essex bungalows were built in the new simple style, employing concrete construction, curved walls and flat roofs. The only private houses wholly designed by the Russian émigré Berthold Lubetkin were a pair of weekend bungalows built in 1936 for £1,500, at Whipsnade in Bedfordshire. One was for his own use and, though small, provided him with an opportunity to experiment with ideas of free planning and open façades. More affordable options for design-conscious weekenders were available in the ‘Beachlands’ Type Q Bungalow at Pevensey Bay, Sussex, colloquially known as the ‘Oyster’ bungalow because of its semicircular living room. Boulton & Paul added the flat-roofed ‘Sunshine’ bungalow to their prefabricated timber range in the mid-1930s, providing a half-glazed semicircular lounge between two bedrooms. Significantly, all these designs retained small outdoor spaces as part of the accepted bungalow plan, and in the ‘Beachlands’ bungalow the shaded curve below the overhanging roof was still called a ‘verandah’.
A row of ‘Oyster’ bungalows at Beachlands, Pevensey Bay, Sussex. Designed by Martin & Saunders Ltd (1937–9), these weekend bungalows cost £295. The ‘D’-shaped living room measured 18 by 12 feet, and bunk beds were fitted to maximise space.
Beyond its fashionable status, reasons for applying the bungalow name were not always obvious. This Edwardian Bungalow Café was situated among a row of shops on Cardiff High Street, looking towards Cardiff Castle.