Home Plans and Design

Craftsman home plans were the product of the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished in America, England, and Canada in the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries as a reaction against the soulless machine production typical of the Industrial Revolution, and the frivolous embellishment which characterized Victorian architecture. Its basic tenets were traditional hand craftsmanship and truth to the materials employed in building. The Arts and Crafts movement is usually considered the child of artist William Morris and the art critic John Ruskin, who idealized the honesty of work, and considered machines to be the root cause of many social problems. One of the hallmarks of the style was simplicity and integrity of form, often exposing the underlying construction without superfluous ornamentation as well as truth to structure, function, and materials which reflected a moral purpose in art. Designers following Arts and Crafts principles often employed patterns drawn from local flora and fauna, and used strong colors and bold forms. Followers of the movement promoted rural handicrafts and were often associated with socialism.

The Arts and Crafts movement in architecture was a reaction against the ornate and artificial styles prevalent in the late nineteenth century. The model was the basic cottage house plan, with well-proportioned forms, steep roofs, deep porches, pointed arched windows, wood fittings and brick fireplaces and chimneys. An early English school of Arts and Crafts architecture was the Century Guild, founded in 1882 by architects A.H. Mackmurdo, Selwyn Image, Clement Heaton, and Herbert Horne. The Art Workers Guild was founded in 1884 by architects William Lethaby, Ernest Newton, Edward Prior, and Mervyn Macartney, and it had 150 members by 1890 (and still exists now). Their style stressed the texture of common materials such as stone, brick, and tile, with asymmetrical building composition for interest. Because of its simple appeal, this style grew in popularity in the early decades of the twentieth century until large scale developments were being constructed in this style and many features of the Arts and Craft approach became standard among mainstream home builders.

In the United States the Arts and Crafts movement was less an attempt to return to pre-industrialization so much as a popularization of the simplicity and clean lines of the country house plan. A group of influential architects and designers in Boston brought the ideas of William Morris to the U.S. in 1897 with the first American Arts and Crafts exhibition. An early pioneer in the field was furniture designer Gustav Stickley, and variations were promoted by Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft community, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School, the Chicago architectural group led by George Washington Maher, the bungalow house style which Greene and Greene popularized, the utopian communities of Rose Valley and Byrdcliffe, as well as developments featuring groups of bungalow-style homes designed by Herbert Hapgood. The ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement in American architecture, particularly the Prairie and Mission styles and the California bungalow style, with their simplicity of design and honest use of building materials remain very popular to this day.