The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  The peace that followed saw a complete assimilation of the style. Greek Revival was no longer viewed as British at all. The citizens of the new North American republic saw themselves to be in a direct line of descent from the birthplace of democracy, and thus the porticoes, the colonnades and the white façades of Greek Revival were reinterpreted as the embodiment of patriotic Americana, American houses fit for American success stories. While the style’s references to Greece, as the birthplace of democracy, made it desirable, it became widespread for far more pragmatic reasons. The classical motifs – a columned portico, a pediment – were easily added to buildings that were already standing, a relatively inexpensive way of making an older house look modern. (The novelist James Fenimore Cooper gently parodied this trend when one of the settlers in The Pioneers is seduced into giving his old-fashioned gabled-roofed house a transformation in the name of Greek simplicity, and suffers correspondingly, as snow accumulates on his stylish but flat Greek roof.)

  The adoption of an architectural style as an expression of patriotism was by no means confined to the USA. As industrialization brought uncertainty and change, many countries developed styles of their own, often using a number of symbolic motifs to represent what were seen to be the country’s individual values, history and virtues, and most commonly drawn from a period thought to represent the values that the present day appeared to lack, or at least wished to emulate. In Britain, the assumption of Tudor as the default history style began in the unstable political world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following the French Revolution, many British landowners, fearing the spread of revolutionary discontent, made sudden and hurried improvements to their workers’ housing, as when the Rothschilds from 1833 built at Tring Park, at Mentmore, Wing and Wingrave, in Buckinghamshire, a series of estate workers’ villages, all white-plastered and black-beamed, with tall Elizabethan-looking chimneys: Rothschild Tudor. Generic Tudor detailing became a shorthand for ‘Merrie England’, for an agricultural past when the local squire was the font of patriarchal benevolence, and industrialism was unknown. The appeal of a style that evoked a mythic past when all had been happy was obvious. By the end of the century, other magnates had followed. From 1888, Port Sunlight, outside Liverpool, was built in the Tudor style for the workers at the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight factory; Cadbury’s workers outside Birmingham were accommodated in the equally Tudor-esque Bournville from 1893. But the style was not merely for workers: many owners applied it to their own properties too, the newly rich especially building Tudor-esque country houses, perhaps to give the impression that they, and their houses, had always been there. Other landowners knocked down old houses and replaced them with ones that were intended to look older than those they replaced. In Kent, a wealthy hosiery manufacturer erected a new ‘Tudor’ manor where once a Georgian house had stood, surrounding it with matching black-beamed cottages for his workers.

  Yet despite Tudor’s ubiquity, and the familiarity now of its component parts, in reality the Tudor style of the nineteenth century and later was very different from the style as it appeared during the Tudor period itself. The black beams and white plasterwork that for the last century and a half have been an archetypal element of the Tudor building style were a nineteenth-century invention. In the sixteenth century, the beams were usually hidden under the plasterwork, which was generally buff-coloured, not white. When, occasionally, the beams were left exposed, they were never painted, which allowed the wood to weather into a silvery-white, only a few tones away from the plaster around it. In the nineteenth century, when black and white became the hallmark of the style, surviving sixteenth-century buildings had their beams uncovered and darkened, to ‘restore’ them to what was assumed to be their original state. This can be seen in a very rare sixteenth-century survival in London, where nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs show the buildings before and after they were ‘restored’ (see plate section, nos. 16 and 17).

  Tudor rapidly established itself as the rural upper-class historical style of choice, but other historical styles also played a notable role in Britain’s construction of the ideal home. Cottage style, a somewhat vague, non-specific term, was a generic that drew on Romanticism’s delight in the picturesque. Romanticism tended to equate pastoral simplicity with domesticity, expressed as a retreat from the world, be it industrial, commercial or urban. In architectural terms, this produced ‘cottages’ that were no longer the tiny, one-roomed, earthen-floored hovels of the working classes, but now prettified, faux-rustic suburban dwellings fitted with all modern conveniences and large enough to suit the nineteenth-century middle-class family. The façades of these buildings replaced classicism’s symmetry and balance with irregular and asymmetric features, and exposed wooden beams and panelled walls inside, while modern sash windows were discarded in favour of old-fashioned small-paned casements. As Tudor was represented by black-and-white façades, so the idea of a cottage was conveyed by a number of stylistic flourishes rather than by its overall design. In the private areas of the house – the bedrooms and studies – high ceilings gave way to low ones, to create a sense of enclosure. Words that indicated a small size, when used to describe a cottage, indicated approval: humble, cosy, snug.

  Queen Anne style, which developed at the same time in towns and cities, is, even today, so common that often it barely registers to the British as a style at all. Superficially it appears to have no connection to cottage style, but the impetus was the same, and so too were the references it drew on, assimilating from the Romantic picturesque a range of asymmetric features and quirky, quaint elements: overhanging eaves, front porches, decorative tiling, oddly shaped windows – bay or oriel in particular – and textured, red-brick construction materials, which aimed to give an impression of individuality.*

  In the USA, elements of Queen Anne and cottage styles were adapted and developed to produce a new generic historical style, a purely American one, known as Colonial. In 1876, in Philadelphia, the Centennial Exhibition displayed objects that had been owned, or at least were thought to have been owned, by the first English settlers. Instead of showing them in a quasi-museum display, the exhibitors built a re-creation, one of the earliest reconstructions of a period room, a stage-set version of a Puritan house. A magazine illustration of the time shows one section, with a fireplace and a cooking pot simmering alongside a woman spinning. The exhibition’s visitors were not shown the historic reality of the seventeenth-century past, a tiny, crowded, single-room house where beds, tools, cooking implements and storage nestled together, and furniture was primarily notable by its absence. And just as this ‘Puritan’ room was not a room any Puritan would have recognized, so too the Colonial style would have bewildered the colonists, who would have been entirely unfamiliar with the white-painted clapboard houses set in neat yards that, from the nineteenth century, have borne their name. Until then, the colonies’ small, shabby houses had rarely been considered worth painting. Instead, the wooden façades gradually darkened with the weather, turning a dull, muddy colour. Outside the cities, yards were unfenced, and rather than being planted, they were liberally dotted with middens and piles of waste. In the early nineteenth century, New York had become known for the first appearance of painted brick house-fronts, although they were not white, but gaily coloured red, yellow or light grey, sometimes with the brickwork outlined in white: the effect was, said many, like looking at a city of dollshouses. In the following decades the houses along the Hudson River, a prosperous location, were also painted, now most commonly white, but it was not until the 1840s that white lead paint became both affordable and readily available. Until then, white-painted houses were a fancy of the upper classes. At about the same date, in north Philadelphia, the first gardens began to be fenced in. It was only from the 1870s that what is now regarded as the traditional, Colonial, style became geographically widespread: the two-storey white clapboard house with painted shutters, front porch, centre door and pitched roof, all behind a neat picket fence
, simply saying ‘America’.

  Thus Victorian Britain had Tudor and the USA had Colonial. The Netherlands had Oud Hollandsch, a style that featured rooms decorated to resemble the interiors in Dutch Golden Age art. As in Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition, the style was promoted via ‘authentic’ display rooms that featured in the many exhibitions that flourished in the last decades of the century. One, in Amsterdam in 1876, advertised itself as a ‘picturesque revelation of life in Amsterdam in earlier and later times’, despite being newly laid out by an architect. Another showed what it called a Kamer van Jan Steen, a room decorated to resemble those in the paintings of Jan Steen, although the room on display actually drew on the decorative traditions of agricultural Friesland, in the north, while Steen came from the urbanized region of the central Netherlands. The exhibitors additionally decorated these supposedly peasant rooms with urban household possessions such as Delft tiles, copper pans and the other seventeenth-century commodity goods familiar to nineteenth-century viewers from the paintings. The purpose was not to create a precise historical simulacrum – the concept of authenticity was not yet a commonplace – but to produce a display that represented the quintessence of the past. And just as nineteenth-century Tudor subsumed the plainer reality of sixteenth-century Tudor, so nineteenth-century Oud Hollandsch formed the twentieth-century’s misreading, still current, of the realism of Dutch Golden Age art.

  In the early part of the nineteenth century, by contrast, both the German territories and much of Scandinavia had enjoyed a style of simplicity and lightness of decoration, using pale woods, a neutral palette and elegantly patterned drapery. This later became known as Biedermeier, although the term was not in use at the time.* It was only after German unification in 1871 that a neo-traditional style, Altdeutsch, developed. Altdeutsch exteriors had stepped gables and ornamental scrollwork, while inside massive furniture was dimly lit by stained-glass windows and Lüsterweibchen. These hanging lamps, in the shape of mermaids, looked back to a sixteenth-century style; the originals were rare, but they appeared in engravings by Dürer, and were thus reintegrated into modern interiors, as carpets on tables had been in the Netherlands. Other popular elements derived from German history included suits of armour (a company in Nuremberg made papier-mâché versions for home consumption), the Lutherstuhl, a wooden armchair, and, most prominently, the Kachelofen, the tiled stove, sometimes with an integrated seat, winsomely dubbed the Schmollwinkel, or sulking corner, all liberally embellished – like the Delft tiles in the Netherlands – with decorative objects that carried resonances of ‘old’ and ‘local’: stoneware, leatherwork, embroidery or weaving with peasant connotations.

  Despite, or perhaps entirely because of, these rustic references, Altdeutsch was a style of the urban haute bourgeoisie. Initially Old Alpine, or Bavarian style, found favour with the tourist market, both inside and outside Germany, for those searching not for sophistication but for a lost ideal of home, as log cabins symbolized a simpler time in the USA, and cottages did the same in Britain. And as cottages had done, so Old Alpine quickly crossed the social scale, from its origins in the primitive houses of country dwellers to decorating the country houses of the affluent. Many who did not embrace the style wholesale nevertheless adopted some of the elements, be it the Brettstuhl, a splay-legged wooden chair, or textured pine walls. (These elements were also incorporated into public spaces such as beerhalls – the Old Alpine Bierkeller is to Germany what the Tudor-beamed pub is to Britain.) By the end of the century a new style for middle-class homes in Munich synthesized the motifs from Old Alpine with modern comfort and technology, and the original patriotic motivation had become almost invisible. As Colonial became simply the ideal of home in the USA, so urban Altdeutsch was identified as gemütlich, and also as behaglich, comfortable in an emotional as well as, or more than, a physical sense.

  These heritage approximations and adaptations, whether Tudor beams, Dürer lamps or white-painted clapboard, subsumed the reality of history, and were both widespread and long-lasting. In a north London suburb in the 1910s, extras that could be added to new houses for an additional payment included faux-rustic fretwork wooden screens, wooden mantelpieces, floor tiles and leaded windows: all items to transform a newly built suburban house into ye olde country cottage. By 2013, a British timber-cladding company promised to create ‘the authentic “New England” look with Cape Cod cladding’, illustrated by a photograph of an accountancy office in the Netherlands. Tudor and Colonial are no longer history, or geographically fixed, just the embodiment of the ideal home.

  These styles meant that it was no longer necessarily the size or fashionability of a house that were used as indicators of the virtue of the family within. Now small houses, country cottages and log cabins could be patriotic by virtue of their choice of symbols from the past, while, conversely, innovations in furnishings and technology could be seen as troubling. In 1852, an American architectural writer condemned the owners of farmhouses who replaced their old, wasteful and fuel-inefficient fireplaces with stoves. Stoves may have consumed less fuel even as they produced more heat, but, his book warned, they gave entirely the wrong impression: ‘A farmer’s house should look hospitable as well as be hospitable … and the broadest, most cheerful look of hospitality within doors … is an open fire’. Another book warned against replacing ‘the hardest and homeliest bench[es]’ with upholstered chairs, the older style being ‘more respectable’. A cheerful-looking hearth was, according to these experts, if perhaps not to the residents themselves, somehow better than actually being warm; furniture that evoked a rugged pioneering spirit was similarly better than furniture that made it possible to sit comfortably. Such attitudes were common across the home countries, the Brettstuhl being no more comfortable than that ‘hardest and homeliest bench’. They were symbolic comforts. Once the Industrial Revolution had turned the world upside down, the past, with its subtext of generic happier days, was always the lost, longed-for ideal. It is not coincidental that the Dutch Golden Age painters returned to popular appreciation in a period when the images could be read as a clear articulation of a pre-industrial once-upon-a-time, now forever out of reach.

  Technology and progress were always in tension with nostalgia and its corollary, that better times were always in the past. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London looked wholeheartedly to progress, technology and the future, but the success of that exhibition spawned many others that chose instead to embrace the supposed simplicities of the past. In the USA the horrors of the Civil War created an increased desire for a simpler, and simplified, past, and found expression in model rooms, either generic, such as a ‘New England kitchen’ of colonial times, or supposedly more specific, such as an ostensible replica of the interior of the house in which Benjamin Franklin had been born in 1706. Here, with the addition of volunteers in olde-worlde dress posing among the pieces of furniture, were all the symbols of heritage: a cradle, a tall case, or grandfather, clock, a spinning wheel. The Colonial kitchen at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 also contained spinning wheels, cradles and an old-fashioned settle, as well as furniture thought to have been owned by specific historical figures – in this case, a desk that was said to have belonged to John Alden, one of the Plymouth colony’s original settlers.* Superannuated technology – here the spinning wheel, and also, in paintings like John Frederick Peto’s Lights of Other Days, a shelf of lanterns, candlesticks and lamps – had become a shorthand for ‘happy olden days’.

  Throughout history, it was accepted as a matter of course that buildings were routinely altered as time went on, with rooms or even wings added, and modifications made to function and decoration. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, the ‘authenticity’ of buildings began to be considered, with later historical additions stripped out in an attempt to return the building to an original state. As industrialization was felt to be creating a new world, many clung hard to their perception of the old one. A Georgian wing on a Jacobean house was no l
onger viewed an organic extension, but wrong. Some people, particularly in places where Romantic notions held sway, went as far as suggesting that all old buildings should be allowed to decay and ultimately fall into ruin: any attempt even to repair them was to interfere with their history.

  By the 1870s, the passion for stripping out later architectural accretions in order to return buildings to a more authentic past had become so strong that an opposition group, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, was formed, to counter the desire for what William Morris, its founder, called ‘forgery’ through overenthusiastic restoration. (Morris’s family, tellingly, nicknamed the group ‘Anti-Scrape’.) He passionately rejected these wholesale restorations, which all too often ‘meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features’. His idea was to repair ‘our ancient buildings’, but then to impose a ban on all future alterations, leaving them ‘as monuments of a bygone art, created by bygone manners’: ‘thus, and thus only can we protect our ancient buildings, and hand them down instructive and venerable to those that come after us’. So while he disapproved of removing earlier layers of history, he still fell into nostalgia’s heritage trap. The accretions of the past were, from his nineteenth-century perspective, history; accretions from his own or any later time, however, were abominations.

  Even as Morris was pleading for the preservation of British monuments, Artur Hazelius, a folklorist and language reformer, was working to preserve the material culture of everyday life in Sweden. He had founded the Nordiska Museet, or Nordic Museum, an ethnographic collection of peasant house-furnishings, children’s toys, clothes and objects of daily life, but by the late 1880s his ambitions were greater. In 1891, Skansen, the world’s first open-air museum, opened on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm. This was not simply a collection of chairs and jugs and dresses. For Skansen, Hazelius collected entire buildings – ultimately 150 farms and cottages from all over Sweden (and one from Norway) – as well as their contents, to build a museum of vanished or vanishing Swedish lifestyle and culture.