Home > About Voysey > Bibliography > Articles about Voysey > Man & his work
C.F. Annesley Voysey : the man and his work
INDEX OF PARTS
Part 3, 11th February 1927
Part III (The Architect & building news, 11th February 1927, pp.273-75)
At the time Voysey began building, the domestic life of the upper middle classes had lost the colour which is preserved to us in the pages of Thackeray and, more strongly, in Dickens’ picture of Dombey’s house and the Merdles’s and the Podsnap’s, where, we may remember, certain choice guests were invited to a heavy ceremonial dinner-party and others, less choice, to a ceremonial “haunch of mutton vapour bath” after dinner. Thackeray, in the pretended personality of Titmarsh, depicts similar scenes of heavy feeding when, in the Book of Snobs, he describes how, whenever he sees a jelly or trifle being removed from table to furnish forth another banquet, he always calls for it and “massacres it with a table spoon.” In Voysey’s early days mahogany curtain-poles and sideboards with decorations like tadpoles and worm castings (the best the machine could then achieve) glued upon them, had gone the way of the wax fruit and wool mats that preceded them. Gone were the grained doors, the statuary marble chimney pieces, polished steel grates, heavy hangings and carpets, and the cast-iron gas-chandaliers hanging from lumpy foliated plaster bosses which matched the massive unfeeling cornice. Gone was the crinoline, and the “bustle” with which Western ladies sought to rival the posterial luxuriance of the hottentot was in its full glory. The huge mantelpiece – Vikings – right-hand Viking looking to the left, left-hand Viking looking to the right – may be said at that time to be the almost sole active survivals of the stuffy, feelingless, mid-Victorian domicile. In London, at any rate, the Willet house was replacing Cubitt as a popular expression of vernacular domestic architecture.
Voysey, when he looked about him as a young man, saw heavy luxury giving way to a richness no less luxurious, though chastened and refined. Curtain-poles were no longer glorified, but became inconspicuous rods; thick dust-harbouring hangings were being replaced by more cheerful and wholesome ones. Graining and marble mantelpieces gave place to paint and richly moulded wood, with tiled surrounds to the grate. “Yallery Greenery,” the “Æsthetics,” “Patience,” neutral-tinted plush upholstery – all these greeted him as the things most conspicuous and most new; and, particularly, did stamped and embossed wall linings force themselves upon his attention. These were endemical in all self-respecting new houses of that time, as distemper is endemical in well-bred dogs. Such linings were specially favoured below the chair or dado rails, and above the frieze or picture rails, without which rails the reception rooms of a gentlewoman’s house would have looked almost as indecorous as the gentlewoman herself would have seemed had she received a guest there without wearing a “bustle” to do it in. Sometimes these embossed linings, bronzed or gilded, over-spread the whole surfaces of walls and ceilings, and broke out in the door panels like a confluent chicken-pox. I have a shrewd idea that even Norman Shaw let himself go in this way once or twice, and Morris’s work of this kind at Stanmore Hall, photographs of which I have lately happened on, so dumbfounds me that I can only ejaculate – like the railway guard who got into a luggage-van where was a Blue Vinney Cheese – Oh, my! In those days severely botanical studies of flowers were painted on the panels of doors, and similar tributes to natural history were paid, on a blue ground, to lengths of drain pipes set on end to serve as umbrella stands. Yes; it is easy to make fun of all this, but the reader must remember that he would have taken it all seriously enough if he had been living in those days. Such gifted men as Norman Shaw, Nesfield, and E.J. May were, unless I am much mistaken, ringing the changes on these devices and ideas. Morris was shaping loveliness when he found all ugly, but it was Voysey who swept the whole thing away and gave architects new ideas to play with and new ideals to inspire them in their conception of small house design and of the relation of the architect to that kind of work.
The impulse of Voysey’s innovation was simplicity, coupled with individualism. In 1916 [sic, should be 1915] he published a book on “Individualism,” but long before this, in 1895, when replying to a discussion on a lecture, I find him saying, “Individualism has no chance if precedence is to be our guide.” I shall give a much truer idea of what is represented in Voysey’s work if I quote from some of his own expositions of the principles underlying it than could be conveyed by any detailed account of the buildings which have been chosen to illustrate these articles.
“Simplicity in design is analogous to sincerity in character. The desire to be simple is borne of the desire to be true. Complexity and duplicity are first cousins. True richness of design is quite compatible with simplicity, but elaboration and complexity are not. True richness requires that the reality shall be as true as the appearance, for things must be what they seem. The richness must arise from nobility and profusion of thought and feeling. True richness depends on quality, not quantity. Accumulation of forms, colours, and textures will often produce what the ignorant and superficial will mistake for richness, but careful observation will quickly dispel the delusion.”
“The exercise of individual choice must result in the unconscious expression of the individual character of the designer. The moment this expression of individuality becomes conscious it becomes forced, and is what we call affectation.”
“Try the effect of a well-proportioned room, with white walls, plain carpets and simple oak furniture, and nothing in it but the necessary articles of use, and one pure ornament in the form of a simple vase of flowers; not a cosmopolitan crowd of all sorts, but one or two sprays of one kind, and you will then find reflections begin to dance in your brain; each object will be received on the retina and understood, classified and dismissed from the mind, leaving you free as a bird to wander in the sunshine or storm of your own thoughts.”
“Floors without floorboards can be formed of wrought joists with concrete partition-slabs laid on the top of them, and floated over on the upper surface with hard plaster or one of the many patent jointless floor coverings or rubber tiles.”
“This kind of floor construction needs no lath and plaster ceiling; distempering between the beams completes it. Skirtings can be made with glazed tiles, set flush with the plaster, or, if preferred, black marble, unpolished, or blue pennant Bath stone or hard vitreous unglazed tiles can be used instead. All that is particularly needed is a border three inches high, and hard enough to withstand the carpet sweeper. The initial cost would be found to balance the expense of the old-fashioned wood skirting, with its grounds and space behind for mice and perpetual need of cleaning and painting. The kind of construction herein advocated, though eliminating much of the carpenter’s and joiner’s work, adds great lustre and importance to that which remains, and so the carpenter and joiner become important factors in the æsthetic and practical values of the building.”
As an example of the vehemence of Voysey’s convictions, I cannot refrain from quoting him on electric bells. In doing so, I would pay tribute to his sense of the value of hyperbole. By ruthless over-statement he makes it impossible for anyone to forget the comparison which favours the earlier pulled-bell.
“To be touched gently on the shoulder is better than a stab in the back, and no one wants to be told so, yet we endure the electric bell which stabs the sound out of one impersonal gong. In days gone by the wire-pulled bell was responsive to the master’s touch, and the servant felt at once the temper of the master in the tone of his call. Each room, too, had its distinctive voice, and the servant knew, without looking at any index, who was wanting him, but with electric bells there is no distinction possible; all users are assassins.”
The illustrations which have appeared with the two previous articles, and which accompany this, have been chosen from a very large number of designs; and if they do not show the best examples of Voysey’s work they represent, in my opinion, buildings which are characteristic of the designer and typical of those that most arrested attention when they were first built, and that are now recognised as signalising the individuality of the architect. I find in a cutting from The Studio, which, however, does not inform me of its date, nor of the particular subject of comment, the following note of one of these Voysey houses: “One of Mr. Voysey’s most charming creations in domestic architecture is published in The Architect for November 8, and we reprint it with the fullest appreciation of its perfect composition and its exquisitely English domestic quality.” And in 1899 Country Life gave a page description of a house which Voysey was then only building. This is the house at Chorley Wood, illustrated in these pages, in which Voysey was not only his own architect, but his own client, and it seems to me to be a memorable achievement and characteristic of the best he did and of the best he taught. Of all that has been done since in a field which was then new, it is difficult to recall anything of the kind more entirely successful, and if The Studio note above quoted refers to this house, it is as just to-day as it was discerning when it was penned. The little house stands in an orchard; it is an English home. It expresses itself without any suggestions borrowed from the past; it relies upon no traditional associations in its architecture: with complete modesty, directness and simplicity it appeals by abstract qualities which are inherent in the craft of building. We catch exactly the same delightful sentiment of reality in the cottages we see at Bibury. I cannot imagine anyone who would wish to alter this little house in any single particular of detail, except possibly that of the buttresses; and when it is remembered that no experienced eye could view it from a distance of even a quarter of a mile and not recognise its authorship, we get, in some degree, a measure of its designer’s genius.
In the next number I shall avail myself of Voysey’s suggestion, say “What I do not like about his work,” and point out “How bad it is.”
House at Frinton-on-Sea
[Now known as The Homestead. Designed in 1905-6 for Sydney Claridge Turner.]
House at Beaconsfield
[Now known as Holly Mount. Designed in 1905 for C.T. Burke.]
"The Orchard," Chorley Wood
[Designed in 1899 by Voysey for his own use.]