The Arts & Crafts Movement. Oscar Lovell Triggs

      It was at this point that the problem of decoration began. The bricklaying and carpentery could be executed directly from the architect’s designs. But when the shell of the house was completed, and stood clean and bare among the apple-trees, everything – or nearly everything – that was to furnish or decorate it had to be likewise designed and made. Only in a few isolated cases, such as Persian carpets and blue china or delft for vessels of household use, was there anything then to be bought ready-made that Morris could be content with in his own house. Not a chair, or table, or bed; not a cloth or paper-hanging for the walls; nor tiles to line fireplaces or passages; nor a curtain or a candlestick. These had to be reinvented, one might almost say, to escape the flat ugliness of the current article. The great painted settle from Red Lion Square was taken and set up in the drawing room, the top of it being railed in so as to form a small music gallery. Much of the furniture was designed by Webb and executed under his eye: the great oak dining table, other tables, chairs, cupboards, massive copper candlesticks, fire-dogs, and table glass of extreme beauty. The plastered walls and ceilings were treated with simple designs in tempera, and for the hall and main living rooms a richer and more elaborate scheme of decoration was designed and gradually executed. The garden was planned with the same care and originality as the house; in both alike the study of older models never sank into mere antiquarianism or imitation of obsolete forms. Morris’s knowledge of architecture was so entirely a part of himself that he never seemed to think about it as anything peculiar. But in his knowledge of gardening he did – with reason – pride himself. It is very doubtful whether he was ever seen with a spade in his hands; in later years at Kelmscott his manual work in the garden was almost limited to clipping yew hedges. But of flowers and vegetables and fruit trees he knew all the ways and capabilities. Red House garden, with its long grass walks, its midsummer lilies and autumn sunflowers, its wattled rose-trellises inclosing richly flowered square garden plots, was then as unique as the house it surrounded. The building had been planned with such care that hardly a tree in the orchard had to be cut down; apples fell in at the windows as they stood open on hot autumn nights.”

      Into this house the Morrises moved during the summer of 1860, and after two years of residence the house was practically completed. “The garden, skilfully laid out amid the old orchard, had developed its full beauty, and the adornment of the house kept growing into greater and greater elaboration. A scheme had been designed for the mural decoration of the hall, staircase, and drawing room, upon various parts of which work went on intermittently for several years. The walls of the spacious and finely proportioned staircase were to be completely covered with paintings in tempera of scenes from the War of Troy, to be designed and executed by Burne-Jones. Below them on a large wall space in the hall was to be a great ship carrying the Greek heroes. It was designed, as the rest of the Troy series were also to have been, in a frankly medieval spirit; a warship indeed of the fourteenth century, with the shields of the kings hung over the bulwarks.