Inside Standen House: William Morris | HENI Talks 'Perspectives'

[Music] in my talk I'm thinking about the Arts and Crafts movement and designers and artists such as William Morris and Philip Webb and how they used their design in their art in a way that they hope would change the society that they saw around them as a result of the Industrial Revolution the period that I'm looking at is the 19th century we were still very much a farming dominated country and in the short time 30 years we moved from farms to factories and as a result of that the work of the common person changed totally

so they were involved in working factories producing more than they could ever need to sell but as a reaction to that we saw the richer getting very very much richer in England but the poorer getting very very much poorer and into this world came these artists and designers who wanted to do something about that and the Arts and Crafts movement was very much a reaction to the world of the poor [Music] about honesty they saw a factory-made goods as dishonest as fake and they wanted to create objects that were truthful about and craftsmanship and that

celebrated the process of actually making art and design [Music] William Morris was celebrated for talking about the importance of beauty in the home but beauty not as a falsehood but beauty derived from the objects themselves and William Morris was incredibly influential because he brought together under the auspices of Morris & Company a whole group of artists and designers who were living with him through this idea of the artists and craftsmen so they shared his political ideas they shared his socialism and they shared this ambition to change the life of the working poor in England one

of the most important parts of Morrison coat and ethos behind it was the idea of the apprentice and the guild system and they were looking back to a medieval practice where people were working together to make things that they needed rather than things to sell but they had to have a purpose a function so it couldn't just be that you looked at them and said well that's just a lovely thing had to be used for something and I think if I look behind me all of the objects that I see from the Bentson tea kettle

to the fabrics used in the curtains were about a practical need as much I mean in Victorian house which is a cold space so you needed thick lined curtains to block the windows and one of the things that we see in this house is curtains used on the walls and paneling because that would keep the heating one of the key partners in Morrison CO was Philip Webb Philip Webb had trained as an architect with William Morris had worked with him from a very early stage in his career and in his thinking maurice very quickly decided

that he was not going to be an architect and he asked webb to design his own house the red house in Bexleyheath in kent in a really important house in the history of the Arts and Crafts movement in terms of Webb working out his ideas for Philip Webb it was about care it was about consideration it was about working with his clients and in Standen which he designed for the beal family who were family who had made their money through these Midland railways through the the greatest of one of the inventions of the Industrial Revolution

he designed them a family country home this house was designed between 1892 and it went on through to 1896 and he found at this site in East Grinstead three medieval farmhouses and he based his whole design around the standing farmhouse designed in the 15th century it's a small farm building that celebrates local craft techniques local materials if you think about many country houses in England you come up the driveway and there is the house in front of you when you come to stand then the first thing you see is the farmhouse and a bomb a

great big farm building and you have to go past them and through an archway and only then you come to the entrance of the house and it's almost as if we're and James Bill Margret bill is his clients almost embarrassed in some ways about their country estate they wanted it to be a home standing is much more about a wonderful country setting and the way Web Design the house was about practicality and function as well as beauty said for example at the heart of this building you see the great big water tower but from a

distance makes us look like a small village but in that water tower were the two massive tanks that were required to be a self-sustaining house it provided water for washing and cleaning and for gardening in really interesting ways when you come to standin one of the first parts of the house you see are the kitchens and the servants quarters he's not hiding them away a lot of architects would have hidden them underneath the house or in the attics they were part of the community of the home and as you move internally through the servants areas

of the house they were equally decorated and celebrated as were the bedrooms and the dining rooms and the drawing rooms of the Beal family and interestingly in one of the main passages that leads to the kitchens and where the servants would be coming through is one of our most important wallpapers for the Arts and Crafts movement trellis because in trellis we see William Morris and Philip Webb working together in a very early design to try and think through what they meant by a natural paper that didn't artificially recreate three dimensions and stories say that Morris

designing the trellis and Philip Webb designed the birds so that in that one piece of wallpaper we see how important this partnership worse where they were thinking through their political and aesthetic ideas by making together [Music] here in the drawing room at standin we can see examples of many of the different designers and artists who worked with Morris & Co so we can see work by lwas Benson who is the very important metal worker we can see designs by William de Morgan who was a ceramics worker and in both Benson and de Morgan's where you

see them learning from the past in terms of craft techniques hammering copper making luster ware and standin is incredibly important in the history of lighting this was one of the first houses built with electricity included and in the lights that we see Phillip web designing for standin we see this relationship between use and beauty because what Webb was trying to do was produce designs based on natural ideas that really worked with this new technology also in the room we see one of the most important pieces of Morris & Co furniture the Morris chair the Morris

chair in itself very much typifies all the ideas we've been talking about in terms of the Arts and Crafts movement so it was an object that had been found in a historic farmhouse so they've looked at a historic design and built it into a 19th century design and it became incredibly popular [Music] so we see objects that were designed by a number of the men who worked with Morrison Co but also at the heart of our story are some very important women designers and yet for many years they've not been seen in the histories of

Morrison company for example Agnes and Rhoda Garrett now the Garrett cousins were incredibly important in the history of design because they were the first women professional decorators they were part of a wider family of women that included Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett they were the people who were doing for the first time jobs that hadn't been considered the role of a middle-class person middle-class women were meant to stay at home and their husbands wealth and success was very much identified by the fact that their women could be at home so it's tandem we have

a number of examples of furniture that was produced by the Garrett cousins including a cabinet in the morning room these are the only objects that we know at the moment that the Garrett's designed that still exists in England I'm sure we'll find more now we're really looking for them but at the moment these the only ones that we know one of the interesting things in standing in a house today that is now run by the National Trust is in the histories of the National Trust we see how important William Morris and Philip Webb were one

of the impacts of the Industrial Revolution was that we saw great waves of English architecture being knocked down to be replaced by streets of houses and factories so William Morris ISM Philip Webb's thinking about the importance of the past turned into them think about how do we preserve that and together they came up with the idea of the society for the protection of ancient buildings the S P a B which of course was one of the most important precursors to Octavia Hill's ideas for the National Trust for an organization that would protect the architecture and

the landscape of England's past William Morris was never afraid to court publicity and upset people when he was celebrating the importance of buildings of the past and he caused a lot of challenge by once describing a cow barn as beautiful as as important as a cathedral and in the highly religious focused Victorian times that was in many ways seen as as an insult but what Morris was saying was in those sorts of buildings in the farm houses and the barns that is still existed in this country we saw the most perfect examples of functional building

that's celebrated how we're building worked rather than just simply how it looked [Music] when I was a child I was very much interested in how this house looked I I warm to it there was something that that made me feel safe my uncle was the gardener here at Standen and so throughout my childhood I played around the farm house and actually lived within the farm house because that was the gardener's house it was only when I started studying art history that I started to realize that they were conscious moves made by the designers here to

change people's lives and that by studying these spaces we can understand how people have lived and we can learn lessons from the past [Music] you