What Are The Classic Arts And Crafts Features?
The Arts and Crafts movement sought to replace the mundane machine with an idealised past, via the endorsement of specialised craftsmen, hand painted ornamentation and human personality in design – essentially advocating quality over quantity. The resulting Victorian houses emphasised natural materials and recalled medieval cottages with sloping roofs, small windows and expansive gardens.
Typical features are white, roughcast render, everything being exposed to explain the construction such as wooden pegs in beams, and bare stone and brick, pebble dash, stone dressed window and door openings, low rooflines.
Think bow windows and multi-paned windows, designed to give the houses a cottage feel. As with the gothic style, stained glass was very popular, because of its medieval feel. There are plenty of good stained-glass designers around today, or it’s perfectly possible to paint your own with many top quality glass paints around.
Walls were most likely wood panelled, but painted, often in dark green colour schemes. The overall colour combinations throughout the house would be in shades of cream, terracotta, mustard yellow, olive green, deep blue and crimson.
But wallpaper was the big trend in the Arts and Crafts movements and the originals used vegetable dyes and wood blocks. Today, there are an abundance of original William Morris designs still being manufactured by the major companies – large scale patterns being the most popular. In fact, Sanderson bought all the original printing blocks from Morris's firm when it closed down.
The flooring was wooden, in either parquet – downstairs - or boards in oak both upstairs and downstairs – a dark stain is imperative to give them that rustic feel.
If you have an original arts and crafts house, the fireplace probably still dominates the room. They had huge wide hearths set in an inglenook and the mantelpieces were often carved, sometimes with ornamental decoration about it.
The tiles used were comparable to art nouveau ones but with stronger colours - blue, turquoise, red and green. They can still be picked up in salvage yards today or good quality reproductions are widely available.
Lighting was typically just plain wall sconces, without any type of embellishment. In the main, the household decoration was delicate and handmade, with very little ornamentation. Natural materials were used, and copper and pewter was popular.
When it comes to the curtains and poles, simple wooden or brass curtain poles were favoured but the curtains were definitely not the frilly kind. For furnishing, when looking to recreate the arts and crafts looks, items of furniture should be wooden and handmade or, at the very least, look handmade. Oak is the most used wood. Look for furniture with cut-outs of upside down hearts; other trademarks included leather straps. In fact, leather was very favoured when it came to individual chairs.
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