In 1859, William Morris married Jane Burden and needed a home. He was twenty-five, a poet and painter, restless and already dissatisfied with the direction of Victorian design. He commissioned his friend Philip Webb to build a house in Upton, near Bexleyheath in Kent, and the couple moved in the following year. The result was Red House, the first building in which Morris fully expressed the principles that would become the Arts and Crafts movement. It was also, in a very practical sense, the place where the firm that became Morris & Co was born.
Red House was not designed to be a manifesto. It was designed to be a home. But the convictions that drove its creation, that buildings should be honest in their materials, that ornament should be integral to structure rather than applied to it, that the daily environment should be beautiful, were so clearly articulated in the house that it became one. The Arts and Crafts movement, which would reshape British design, architecture and decorative arts for the next half-century, began in this red-brick house in what is now suburban south-east London.
The Commission and the Collaboration
Morris gave Webb a brief that was unusually specific for the time. He wanted a house that expressed the values he was beginning to form about art, craft and everyday life. He wanted exposed brick, both for its honesty and for its warmth of colour. He wanted a house that grew from its site rather than being imposed on it. He wanted rooms arranged for actual living rather than for display.
Webb responded with a design that was medieval in its spatial organisation but modern in its approach to function. The house is L-shaped, with two wings arranged around a garden. The living rooms open directly onto the garden through large windows, dissolving the boundary between interior and exterior in a way that was unusual for domestic architecture of the period. The kitchen and other service rooms, which Victorian planning often hid away in a separate wing, were given a considered place within the house.
The building uses red brick throughout, with a tile roof and wooden window frames. The materials are left exposed, their texture and colour forming the decorative surface of the house. There is no applied ornament in the conventional sense. The decoration comes from the pattern of the bricks, the shape of the arches, the grain of the wood. This was a deliberate rejection of the Victorian practice of covering surfaces with applied stucco, plasterwork and mass-produced decorative elements.
The Construction – Craft in Practice
The construction of Red House was itself an exercise in the principles Morris would later advocate. Morris wanted the work done by skilled craftsmen using traditional methods. He was already suspicious of the factory system and the standardisation it imposed. The house was built by hand, with bricklayers, carpenters and glaziers working to Webb’s detailed drawings.
The collaboration between Morris and Webb during construction was close. Morris met the considerable cost of the house himself, from the private fortune he had inherited after his father’s death in 1847. A later scheme to enlarge the house with a second wing, so that Edward Burne-Jones and his family could share it, was drawn up by Webb but never built. What was built was more than enough, however, to demonstrate the principles at stake.
The interior of the house was decorated by Morris and his friends, including Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. These artists belonged to the Pre-Raphaelite circle that had formed around Rossetti, into which Morris and Burne-Jones had been drawn after leaving Oxford. They painted murals on the walls, designed furniture and helped furnish the house. The collaboration was the foundation of what would become Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, founded in 1861 and later known as Morris & Co, the decorative arts firm that would carry the Arts and Crafts aesthetic into commercial production.
The Interior – Decoration as Architecture
The interior of Red House represents a radical departure from the prevailing Victorian approach to domestic decoration. Victorian interiors typically treated decoration as a layer applied to architecture, covering walls with patterned wallpaper, filling rooms with mass-produced ornament and arranging furniture for display rather than use. Morris and Webb reversed this approach.
The walls at Red House are either exposed brick or decorated with murals painted directly onto the plaster. The furniture, much of it designed by Webb, is simple and functional, built from oak with visible joints and honest construction. The textiles, worked by Morris and Jane Morris as embroidery and hangings, use botanical patterns drawn from direct observation of plants and flowers. The stained glass, designed by Burne-Jones and Webb, is integrated into the windows as an architectural element rather than applied as decoration.
Jane Morris’s contribution to the interior decoration has been underestimated in many accounts. Her needlework, her choice of textiles and her involvement in the garden design all shaped the character of the house. The domestic environment at Red House was a collaborative creation, reflecting the shared aesthetic values of the Morris circle rather than the vision of a single designer.
The Garden and the Landscape
The garden was conceived as an integral part of the house, not as an ornamental appendix. It was laid out with simple beds and paths, using plants chosen for their colour, scent and form. The approach drew on the medieval garden tradition, with its emphasis on useful and beautiful plants, rather than the formal bedding schemes that dominated Victorian horticulture.
The garden at Red House anticipated ideas about the relationship between house and landscape that recur throughout Morris’s later work. The idea that a garden should be a living extension of the house, that it should favour hardy and naturalised plants, and that it should be designed for sensory pleasure rather than botanical display, all finds an early expression in this Bexleyheath garden.
The site of Red House, on what was then the edge of London, allowed Webb and Morris to design a house that engaged with its landscape in a way that would have been impossible in a denser urban setting. The relationship between house and garden at Red House is one of its most important achievements, establishing a model for suburban domestic architecture that valued the connection between building and ground.
The Rejection – Why Morris Left
Morris lived at Red House for about five years, from 1860 until 1865. He left not because he was dissatisfied with the house but because keeping it had become impractical: the long daily journey to the firm’s premises in central London was exhausting, the cold rooms aggravated his rheumatic ill health, and a cherished plan to extend the house so that the Burne-Jones family could join them collapsed after illness struck that household. The relative isolation that had once been an attraction became a burden. Morris moved his family to Queen Square in Bloomsbury, and Red House was sold.
Morris’s departure is sometimes presented as evidence that the house was impractical, that its ideals were incompatible with the realities of daily life. This reading misses the point. Red House was not a prototype for mass housing. It was a personal project, an experiment in living that demonstrated principles Morris would spend the rest of his life developing. The fact that he left the house does not diminish its importance. It confirms that Red House was a starting point, not an endpoint.
Morris retained a deep affection for the house throughout his life; by many accounts the pain of giving it up was such that he never returned to see it again. The years he spent there are widely regarded as decisive in the development of his thinking about the relationship between art, craft and daily life. The house was the laboratory in which the Arts and Crafts movement was conceived.
The Legacy – Arts and Crafts and After
Red House is now owned by the National Trust, which acquired it in 2003. It is the only house William Morris ever built and Philip Webb’s first independent commission, and it is recognised as one of the most important buildings in the history of British design. The Trust has carried out extensive conservation work, caring for the surviving decorative schemes and opening the house to visitors.
The Arts and Crafts movement that Red House helped inaugurate had a complex and sometimes contradictory legacy in British culture. It inspired some of the finest work in British decorative arts, furniture design and architecture. It also became, in its later manifestations, a form of nostalgic escapism, a retreat from industrial modernity that could be both politically naive and aesthetically conservative. The movement’s emphasis on handcraft and individual expression sat uneasily with the social conditions of industrial Britain, and Morris himself was aware of this contradiction.
The Arts and Crafts influence is visible in the work of later British designers such as C.F.A. Voysey and M.H. Baillie Scott, in craft guilds such as C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, and in the more recent revival of interest in craft and making. The principles that Morris and Webb articulated at Red House, that materials should be honest, that ornament should be structural, that daily life should be surrounded by beauty, remain the foundation of good design practice.
For south-east London, Red House is a local landmark with national significance. Bexleyheath is not a place that visitors associate with great architecture, but the house on Red House Lane is a reminder that radical ideas can emerge from unexpected locations. The Arts and Crafts movement did not begin in a London studio or a university lecture hall. It began in a red-brick house in Kent, built by two young men who believed that the way we live should be beautiful.
Image: William Morris’s ‘Strawberry Thief’ furnishing textile, designed in 1883 for Morris & Co. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
