At home with the English

The English House
by Hermann Muthesius

In 1896 Hermann Muthesius, a Prussian architect and civil servant in his mid-thirties, arrived in London to work as a cultural and technical attaché at the German embassy. His mission, apparently instigated by the Kaiser, was to study the domestic architecture of the United Kingdom, a subject that was attracting international interest. The result was Das englische Haus, first published in Berlin in three volumes in 1904–5. This remarkable book surveys not only the architecture but also the decoration, gardens and way of life associated with houses in England. Muthesius deeply admired the achievements of English architects and designers, and argued that Germany had much to learn from their example.

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Although this was a period of intense imperial and industrial competition between the two countries, Muthesius’s investigations were in no sense covert. He and his wife, Anna Trippenbach, who was also an author, settled in Hammersmith, not far from the home of Muthesius’s great hero William Morris, who died that year. Muthesius set about visiting houses and interviewing leading architects and designers, several of whom, notably Walter Crane and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, became his friends (Muthesius’s ‘English house’ incorporated Scotland). He thus experienced at first hand Britain’s greatest flowering of domestic design, splendidly depicted in his book’s array of masterpieces by Mackintosh, Norman Shaw, Voysey, Baillie Scott, Walton, Lorimer and Lutyens, and many other lesser known but brilliant talents.

Astonishingly, Muthesius’s book is still the only truly comprehensive survey of the houses of this miraculous period, which is reason enough for its republication today. An abridged English translation first appeared in 1987, sold out immediately, and is today an expensive rarity. In the late 1980s the revival of interest in Morris and the arts and crafts that had begun in the early 1960s was still in full flow and the interiors of many cultivated English middle-class homes paid tribute to the designers Muthesius admired, with Morris chintzes and wallpapers, and Voysey and Mackintosh furniture (or replicas of it).