Red House: Some Architectural Histories

Abstract

William Morris died in October 1896, drawing fresh attention to the circumstances of his life at a moment when he was at the height of his fame. In the same month, Hermann Muthesius took up his post as technical attaché at the German embassy, to make a study of recent English developments in architecture and industry. Just over a century ago, in 1904, he published his great Das englische Haws, the book that did more than anything to place Red House in the mainstream of architectural history. Yet already, in 1897, in the first full-length account of William Morris’s work, Aymer Vallance had written that ‘as an experiment on the part of a man who had both the hopefulness and the dauntless will necessary to enable him to make a stand against the tyranny of custom, to William Morris is owing the credit of having initiated, with his Red House, a new era in house-building’. The historiography of Red House is the story of the different versions of that often-repeated view.