The Timeless Appeal of Arts & Crafts Houses

We all have an idea of the perfect country home, complete with inglenook fireplace, wooden beams and roses growing round the door. In this enduring vision, although we might not know it, we’re heavily influenced by the late-19th-century movement known as Arts & Crafts.

The term evokes the essence of homeliness, but the movement was in fact a rebellion against the Industrial Revolution and mass production. It took shape when the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in London in 1887 to revive the decorative arts, began to move into architecture, and it is now lauded worldwide as one of the great domestic design idioms.

“The Arts & Crafts movement is very varied,” says Frederick Gatfield, a heritage planner at Savills. “It’s not so much an architectural style as an approach to design.” It spans all manner of residences, from modest homes to generous mansions, imbued with a sense of history and handmade detailing. 

Originally, the movement was driven by a strong moral philosophy, along with a sense of revivalism and a fear of loss. “Thinkers such as John Ruskin, designer William Morris and architect Philip Webb wanted to bring back guild-based crafts to improve lives,” says Gatfield. An urgency about historic conservation grew – in 1877, Morris founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings – to preserve traditional crafts and materials for their picturesque, as well as their instructive, qualities. That’s when Arts & Crafts really took off.

From the 1880s to the 1910s, to have an Arts & Crafts house was the height of fashion. Such homes flourished in areas with a rich local tradition to draw on, helped by a prosperous client base clamouring for the look. They were designed by a roster of star architects including Webb, Edwin Lutyens and CFA Voysey. “Buyers were helped by proximity to cities where they could make the money to build dream homes,” Gatfield says. 

Some were grand in scale, including Abbotswood, an eight-bedroom early-20th-century Arts & Crafts house near Godalming, Surrey. Sometimes they were projects of prestige and patronage: Blackwell, in the Lake District, was designed by architect Baillie Scott in 1898 as a holiday home for a Mancunian brewer and is now open to visitors. But this was also a movement with social purpose: architects strove to build inexpensive homes according to Arts & Crafts principles, and examples can still be seen in Letchworth Garden City and Hampstead Garden Suburb. 

One of its tenets was to represent the spirit of place, says Gatfield: “The styling often refers to the local vernacular.” As it spread, it gained variants, particularly in Scotland, courtesy of fêted architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Robert Lorimer, who restored Earlshall Castle in Fife along Arts & Crafts lines in the 1890s. Northfield, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, was designed by Walter Crum Watson in 1910, with hints of the Scottish style. 

By the early 20th century, the movement had hit America too. The furniture-maker Gustav Stickley became a huge influence through his magazine The Craftsman, inspiring mansions across the US – indeed, the style has enjoyed a recent boost courtesy of the quaint Stateside trend known as “cottagecore”. 

So why do Arts & Crafts homes appeal so strongly to buyers today? It’s partly their unusually generous proportions, liveability and personality. “Clients are drawn to voluminous spaces, natural light and high-quality finishes, all of which are characteristic of the Arts & Crafts movement,” says Phillippa Dalby-Welsh, head of Savills country department. “We’ve seen a leaning from buyers towards natural materials, the vernacular and the environmentally sensitive over the past decade, too. Arts & Crafts evoked nature and was concerned with sustainability, which is very relevant now.”

While it is sometimes said that the Arts & Crafts movement didn’t survive the First Word War, its rich legacy can be seen across our towns and suburbs. “Much subsequent popular housing has incorporated elements such as half-timbering, leaded windows, tall chimneys and gables,” says Gatfield. “It has a timeless appeal.” And in an age of concerns about globalised homogeneity, it’s small wonder that our taste for quirky Arts & Crafts homes is livelier than ever. 

Pictures from top: the exterior of Conford Park House in Hampshire; a sitting room at Abbotswood in Surrey; Earlshall Castle in Fife; and Great Tangley Manor in Surrey