The enduring appeal of Arts and Crafts homes

When designer, poet, novelist and social activist William Morris told members of a Birmingham arts society in 1880 to ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ he unwittingly inspired legions of modern-day home influencers. Marie Kondo exhorts her acolytes to only own things that ‘spark joy’, minimalist Joshua Becker leads the way in radical decluttering, and Netflix star duo’s The Home Edit tames unruly celebrity spaces. But Morris, widely credited as the godfather of the Arts and Crafts movement, did it arguably more eloquently than anyone else.

In fact, Morris’s own home, the Thames-side Red House, which he co-designed in 1861 with his friend and collaborator Philip Webb – in turn known as the father of Arts and Crafts architecture – was described by pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti as ‘more a poem than a house’. The quasi-medieval Bexleyheath building, which Morris shared with his muse and embroiderer wife Jane, was the movement’s aesthetic values made manifest, with its soaring gable roofs and oriel windows.