Houses and Gardens: Arts and Crafts Interiors. M.H. Baillie Scott

This classic work was conceived and written nearly a century ago by an author anxious to argue the case for sound house planning. It aimed to offer an alternative to the numerous books which instructed and advised their readers on the essentials of successful garden design and management, but paid scant attention to the actual houses which sat within their grounds. Indeed, the problems involved in house building, furnishing and decoration had hardly been treated with the consideration which the author felt they appeared to deserve. Interestingly, the author railed against much of the building design of his day comparing it to a disease rather than an art where, in his view, ‘smirking self-conciousness’ was often the consequence of an attempt to achieve the picturesque. Baillie Scott lamented the gradual disfigurement of town and village by what he saw as a plague of modern building and was saddened that his contemporaries seemed to have forgotten that houses had been and might yet be an added beauty rather than a blot on the landscape. He felt passionately that reform was urgently needed and that the plan of the average modern house, apart from artistic considerations, should be rationally designed. In this surprisingly timeless work, which provides today’s reader with an intriguing insight into the thoughts of a designer from an earlier age, the principles of house planning are developed and supported by numerous described and illustrated exmples from the UK and abroad. The author includes all types of houses including terraces, cottages, semi-detached, flats, holiday homes and grander dwellings. All the principles of good house design are comprehensively discussed and illustrated as are the internal furnishings which, in the author’s view, are so vital for the successful achievement of a unified and satisfactory whole.