Great Houses of the Arts and Crafts Movement by David Cole

Great Houses of the Arts and Crafts Movement by David Cole

The Arts and Crafts Movement, founded in the philosophies of John Ruskin and William Morris, produced some of the world’s most enduring architectural masterpieces. Author and architect David Cole presents the 100 great Arts and Crafts houses, each individually described and analysed with insightful detail and floor plans, and illustrated with stunning photography. Beginning with Morris’s own iconic Red House, the book traces the fifty-year span of the movement, with a short chapter dedicated to each of these extraordinary houses: from the works of the pioneer Arts and Crafts architects, to the great reformer architects of the next generation, to the craftsman architects who took their lives and their work to the countryside, to the movement’s Scottish architects, and finally to the houses of the Garden Cities and suburbs built through the movement’s last decade before the First World War. The book features the great houses of some forty of the movement’s most renowned architects, including Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw, E.S. Prior, William Lethaby, C.F.A. Voysey, Edgar Wood, Ernest Gimson, the Barnsley brothers, C.R. Ashbee, M.H. Baillie Scott, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Robert Lorimer, Parker and Unwin, and many others.
As Morris famously said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

David Cole is a recently retired architect who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Throughout his career as a design director with a major Australian-based international architectural practice, he specialised in the design of large-scale urban residential, hospitality, commercial, and civic projects. In over 30 years of practice he has designed projects throughout Australia, Japan, Thailand, China, United Arab Emirates, and New Zealand. David is an authority on the architecture of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. He is the author of two previous books on Arts and Crafts subjects: The Art and Architecture of C.F.A.Voysey, published in 2015, and the best-selling architectural biography Sir Edwin Lutyens: The Arts and Crafts Houses, published in 2017.