Baillie Scott: The Artistic House

Diane Haigh

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Review

No-one could produce a study of the work of Baillie Scott without reference to J D Kornwolf’s encyclopaedic monograph of 1972 – effectively out of print, alas – and Diane Haigh acknowledges her clear debt to Kornwolf at the outset.  She also announces her intention to focus only on a selection of his surviving buildings, and to examine them in some detail, with photographs and plans, in an attempt to capture the essence of his creative intentions.

Though his work certainly falls within the context of the Arts and Crafts movement, Baillie Scott was always something of an outsider.  He never belonged to any of their clubs or guilds, nor did he ever meet their great guru, William Morris.  After an abortive start in agriculture at Cirencester, young Baillie Scott was articled to the City Architect of Bath, an unlikely training ground for a pupil with obvious Arts and Crafts sympathies.  These found a more fruitful environment when he moved to the Isle of Man and to a friendship with the Manx craftsman and designer Archibald Knox.  The latter’s Celtic traditions can be seen in Baillie Scott’s early work, such as the local police station at Castletown, and in his own Red House, which in name as well as spirit, recalls Morris’ first home.  Here for the first time, the basic internal spaces interconnect ingeniously in a way which would characterise his later work, as he abandoned many of the stylistic details dear to his contemporaries, and moved towards greater simplicity and directness.

About this time, similarities between his work and that of C F A Voysey are marked, and direct comparisons can be made in the houses which these two great designers built on Lake Windermere in 1898.  Voysey’s “Moor Crag”, more regular in concept, skirts the water, while Baillie Scott’s “Blackwell” stands high above the lake.  “Blackwell”, one of the featured houses in this book, is internally the more interesting both spatially and decoratively, though in subsequent work he abandoned this in favour of a more severe aesthetic, which endeared him to the generation of architects which was to follow, such as Behrens, Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe.

Baillie Scott’s practice survived the slumps of the Great War in part due to the fame he earned as the author of “Houses And Gardens”, which brought his work and his ideas to a wide audience.  He went on to design a great body of domestic architecture, and was closely involved with the Garden City movement which provided a viable alternative to the dreary rows of terraced houses all over the country.  The main themes of Baillie Scott’s agenda, elegant homes for the average householder, open spacious planning, continuity of internal and external space and the appropriate use of vernacular materials, are as important today as they were 100 years ago.

All the featured projects in this book are handsomely photographed and include an assessment of their current condition.  Diane Haigh concludes with a most delightful memoir of the architect by John Betjeman. - review by Stewart Grimshaw