Judith B. Tankard, Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2004.

This handsomely produced volume takes us through the theory and practice of the Arts and Crafts Garden from the era of William Morris up to the present in pictures, photographs, garden plans, and text.

For those familiar with the house and home aspects of the English Arts and Crafts movement, Tankard’s book will be a delight, and an education. Gardens, like buildings and furnishings, were a venue for reform and innovation, an opportunity to express integrity and beauty, and a chance to move beyond the artificiality of the dominant Victorian paradigm. For garden design, this meant rejecting Victorian orderliness and ostentation in favor of naturalism and informality. While certainly not “simple” gardens – Tankard’s illustrations portray wonderfully green lawns, orderly hedges, topiary, rustic steps and garden pools and fountains, along with roses and, typically, local flowers – the overall effect is an inviting one of comfort and ease rather than grandeur.

Garden design evoked considerable discussion during the height of the Arts and Crafts period, especially given the fact that the famous architects of the day (C. F. A. Vosey, M. H. Baillie Scott) viewed house and garden as a unified whole. As Tankard says, the Arts and Crafts movement “gave gardens a new definition as a harmonious component of the house. Gardens … were never an end in themselves, but were intertwined with the house like ivy growing on a wall, blurring the distinctions between indoors and outdoors.”

Tankard’s volume focuses on the homes and gardens of England, with modest attention given to the United States (and none at all to other countries). This I think is appropriate given England’s preeminent gardens and landscapes. The reader is given an extensive tour of over a hundred gardens, with full commentary on their design as well as the garden philosophy of their architects.  The contributions of Gertrude Jekyll and Thomas Mawson, the most distinguished landscape architects of the era, are given especial attention, and an entire chapter is devoted to the renowned English gardens created by the collaboration of the architect Edwin Lutyens and Jekyll.

Pamela Todd, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Home, photographs by Chris Tubbs, Chronicle Books, 2005

Pamela Todd and Chris Tubbs have compiled a welcome overview of the life, the philosophy, the works, and the influence of William Morris, the English 19th century polymath who is universally considered the father of the Arts and Crafts style. Morris (1834-1896), best known as a designer of floral textiles and wallpapers, promoted an arts and crafts aesthetic even before the appellation was invented, opening his London shop 1861 to sell hand crafted furniture, stained glass, and miscellaneous decorative products to the modestly avant guarde consumers of the period, upper middle-class consumers disgusted with mass produced products and Victorian excess. In the years that followed he and a range of talented associates pioneered new design principles that powerfully influenced English, and later American, architecture and interior furnishings.

This book focuses on the Arts and Crafts home, devoting text and pictures first to the homes Morris himself lived in (Red House in Kent and Kelmscott Manor in the Cotswolds) and then presenting six “case studies” of Morris principles applied to a manor house, a country house, a town house, a mansion, a farm house, and a late-Victorian terraced home.

All of these homes, handsomely photographed, share Morris’ distinctive style – handmade crafts; natural colors; a tendency toward the gothic; furniture that, by the standards of the period at least, were simply designed; painted and papered walls; richly floral rugs.

While a bit elaborate for American Arts and Crafts sensibilities – here the style associates more with middle class bungalows, wood shingles, paneled walls, and Stickleyesque furniture – Morris’ principles set the tone for design conscious homeowners then, and now. His legacy – homes and furnishings that are simple, solid, beautiful, and functional – carries on.

Leslie M. Freudenheim, Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home, Gibbs Smith, 2005.

Leslie M. Freudenheim’s Building with Nature: Inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Home, is a reworking of her earlier (1974) Building with Nature, Roots of the San Francisco Bay Region Tradition, written with Elizabeth Sussman. Her new book has two objectives – one descriptive, one argumentative.  Freudenheim, first, presents a thorough overview of the first three decades (1880-1910) of the California Arts and Crafts movement, especially in terms of its architecture. Second, she argues a thesis – that the Reverend Joseph Worcester, known best as the leader and first minister of San Francisco’s famous Swendenborgian church, was the central instigator, advocate, and proponent of the movement.

The book excels as a general introduction to the Bay Area’s pioneering Arts and Crafts community – its practitioners, its theory, its practice, and its influence.  With an engaging and conversational tone, Freudenheim traces the work and interactions of the movement’s founders – Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk, John Hudson Thomas, John  Galen Howard, and others who created the Craftsman aesthetic – simple structures, unpainted shingles, wood interiors with furniture built in, overhanging eves, and (relative) affordability. The text is wonderfully supplemented with sepia photographs.

The less successful element of Freudenheim’s book is her thesis giving Joseph Worcester central position as inventor of the Bay Area style. Speculating broadly from private correspondence and scrapbooks, she portrays Worcester not only as the most influential advocate and disseminator of the arts and crafts philosophy but also as the hidden intelligence behind much of its noteworthy architecture.

The 1976 Piedmont bungalow Worcester designed for himself,  for example, she anoints as the Ur-cottage, the shingled bungalow prototype for all that was to come. His rustic cottage, she posits, so impressed his young neighbor, Bernard Maybeck, that Maybeck emulated its principles in his own Berkeley buildings. The Worcester designed homes on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, build some 10 years later, brought Arts and Crafts across the Bay, establishing a model that then spread through California, and beyond.

Similarly, she credits Worcester with inspiring the famous “mission” styled chair built for the Swendenborgian church, and with working behind the scenes to bring John Galen Howard to Berkeley as campus architect. According to Freudenheim, Worcester felt that Howard was likely to be far more sympathetic to the Arts and Crafts orientation than the Beaux Arts architect who actually prevailed in Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s famous campus design competition of 1899. “Worcester engineered Howard’s selection,” she writes, implying that he also powerfully influenced Howard’s own plans for campus buildings.

As history, Freudenheim’s speculations concerning Worcester’s preeminence rarely rise beyond the level of conjecture, and Freudenheim does hedge her thesis with myriad “we can speculate’s,”  “it is likely’s,” and “perhaps’s.”  While her hypothesis remains shaky, the book as a whole provides a refreshing retelling of Bay Area architectural history, and the valuable contributions of one of its lesser-known participants.

Beyond the Bungalow: Grand Homes in the Arts and Crafts Tradition, Gibbs Smith, 2005.      

Paul Duchscherer’s latest foray into bungalowbilia doesn’t really deal with bungalows at all.  His Beyond the Bungalow (brightly photographed by Linda Svendsen), on the heels of his earlier The Bungalow (1995), Inside the Bungalow  (1997), and Outside the Bungalow (1999), examines, as its subtitle explains, grand homes in the Arts and Crafts tradition. An effort at nomenclature as well as explanation, this latest volume classifies and describes those larger-than-bungalow homes that share, in their design principles and philosophy, at least a family resemblance to the, if you will, basic bungalow.

While some might question denying big homes the bungalow rubric (Duchscherer recognizes the problem given the majestic Greene and Greene "ultimate bungalows"), he makes a strong case for recognizing separately the relevance and beauty of those two and three-story large footprint houses of the 1900-1930 era that so impressively remind us of the best of American pre-Depression residential architecture. His typology of the big home is fourpart – The American Foursquare, The Rustic Home, Craftsman (which he describes as classic Arts and Crafts), and Craftsman Crossovers, with its own nine subcategories: Swiss Chalet, Oriental Style, Prairie, Shingle, Colonial Revival, Mission, Spanish Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, and English Cottage Style. Each type is described generically and illustrated with exemplar cases.

The book, certainly a handsome volume, is saddled with an unfortunately undersized type, and a rather abrupt ending. A useful list of open-to-the public historic homes is appended.

Christian and Christen Gladu, Bungalow Plans, Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City, 2002.

The second coming of the arts and crafts movement brings with it a revival of many of the aspects of original era. In Bungalow Plans, Gladu and Gladu continue the tradition of disseminating house plans originally promoted by pioneers like  Gustav Stickley who, through magazines and catalogs, offered the broad middle class architectural drawings – plans of simple, affordable, well designed homes – that incorporated the Arts and Crafts ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris.

The Gladus offer 25 bungalow plans in their book, each accompanied by photographs, text, and information on designers and builders. Their aim is not only to show different kinds of  homes – everything from 600 square foot garlows (not yet in my on-line dictionary, but apparently garage and other "accessory" units) to 4000 square foot "ultimate" bungalows – but to provide practical advice on adapting stock  plans to modern, especially environmental, concerns. Introductory chapters put the plan book approach in historical perspective and offer useful context on "bungalow anatomy" and building costs. A section on resources concludes the volume.

Linda Parry, Textiles of the Arts & Crafts Movement, new edition, Thames and Hudson, 2005.

Parry, a Deputy Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, completed the original version of this book to commemorate the centenary of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the organization that from its founding in1888 to 1916 provided the primary British venue for showcasing the range of the new decorative art – furniture, rugs, metalwork, textiles – that so influenced the fashion, furnishings and architecture of the era. The Society not only gave us the term – "arts and crafts" – that has come to encapsulate the movement, it provided respectability to an alternative art and design form built upon craft, modest studio and workshop production, and sympathetic retailers, an art form that enjoyed broad public success then, and now, in  revival for the past 30 years.

Parry’s focus on textiles shown in the Exhibition Society shows limits her survey of course, not only by geography (the exhibitors were all British), but by period. While she provides an introductory chapter on arts and crafts principles and reviews the work of early practitioners including William Morris, the major contribution of the book, and what gives it its uniqueness, is the detailed and comprehensive description of the exhibited textiles in terms of design, materials, production, technology, and sales. Parry’s thesis, so far as there is one, is that the exhibitions, by giving extensive space and attention to textiles, provided a new legitimacy for the medium, moving it, along with the other decorative arts, toward greater parity with painting and sculpture.

This book, one of a recent spate of specialized volumes on textiles, is  probably more for the specialist than the general interested reader. While the text is on the clunky side, the book’s extensive color illustrations of rugs, wallpapers, woven and printed fabrics, lace, and clothing are wonderful. Parry also provides a useful directory of textile designers, craftsmen, manufacturers and retailers.