ABSTRACT
‘Whatever you have in your rooms think first of the walls, for they are that which makes your … home’, said the Arts and Crafts pioneer William Morris (1834–1896). His News from Nowhere (1892) opposes Victorian utilitarianism to present ‘the spirit of the new days’ as a ‘delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth, on which man dwells’. He envisions surfaces equally expressive of the ‘generosity and abundance of life’. With John Ruskin’s Gothic characteristics of ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘Redundance’ in mind, the Gothic architecture in which Morris sought inspiration is generous. This essay examines these surfaces of generosity in the work of William Morris, architect Philip Webb (1831–1915), and the Arts and Crafts domestic interior: firstly, through the medieval spirit of Red House (the home Philip Webb designed for Morris, as his first married home, in 1858–1859) and partially realized in the hortus ludi of its Garden of Pleasure. Secondly, we move from the outdoor room of the Garden of Pleasure to the Morrisian interior proper, where Romance is engendered in generously layered hierarchies of surface, scaled to simplicity or splendour.
