Hubert Savage, Architect (2)

 

 

The instinct for beauty 

 

 

Dove Cottage, once the home of poet William Wordsworth, Lake District, England

 

Many architects helped to shape British Arts and Crafts architecture, but there were some recurring themes: building in ways typical of the locale, using vernacular materials, was one (timber or stone sourced on-site intensified the effect); shaping a new house to suit the site it would occupy, by drawing design leads from its topographic and scenic details, was another; integrated design of all details, including interior finishes and decor, to unify the outcome, was a third. Construction based on these design principles by highly skilled craft-based labour was how new buildings could be produced. These were not the only themes pursued by Arts and Crafts architects, but they were among the most universally applied. Foremost among the people shaping the Arts and Crafts direction in the early twentieth century were Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin - architects working in shared practice who were selected to design the first-ever Garden City (at Letchworth, some thirty miles north of London). The ideas that galvanized the Garden Cities movement arose from the groundbreaking writings of Ebenezer Howard (Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1901). Parker and Unwin first came to public attention by authoring an influential book entitled The Art of Building A Home (1901) advocating techniques steeped in an Arts and Crafts perspective. The pair were later on invited by Gustav Stickley, editor and convener of The Craftsman (an influential American Arts and Crafts magazine) to recast their book into a series of articles. Barry Parker, in one such article appearing in 1910, remarks that "every house should to a very large extent be thought out on its site". This continues a line of thinking he first elaborated in The Art of Building a Home: "The site is the most important factor to be considered, for it usually suggests both the internal arrangement and the external treatment." 

 

 

Parker & Unwin, master plan of Letchworth, the first-ever Garden City

 

It was a credo among Arts and Crafts architects that pristine sites could give important design-cues that enabled houses to mate more intimately with their setting. This was a precept Savage undoubtedly knew about, and one his particular situation (designing a dwelling for personal use, in the midst of unspoiled nature) allowed him to fully implement. In the creative act of designing the bungalow, he was also blessed to have a picturesque setting and a defining ridge surrounded by old oaks. Parker goes on to suggest how to turn the unique qualities of the setting to account: "In fact, to produce a good plan, one should go to the site without any preconceived conventions, but with a quite open mind, prepared to think out each fresh problem on the spot from the beginning, and to receive all the suggestions the site can offer. I hope you will pardon me if I seem to insist unduly on the importance of so elementary a principle as that of building to suit each site." Building to suit the site was just what Savage had in mind for Grange Road, with the overall aim of raising a building that would fit the physical circumstances as a hand does a glove.

 

 

Picturesque English cottage in Selworthy, Somerset, photo circa 1888

 

Parker's article in The Craftsman continues: "the designer must go on to the site and let it dictate to him what shall be the interior arrangement of the house, and largely what shall be its exterior treatment. The site must suggest the interior arrangement because the contours and falls of the land must have their influence on the design, or the house can never be one which will look as if it had come there naturally, and were a pleasant part of its surroundings...". Parker's objective was to forge a bond between house and setting, so they became indissolubly linked and seemed to have been made for one another. This was the same naturalistic approach taken in laying out traditional English villages, or even individual cottages (c.f. photo above, noting how the cottage steps down the site's contour). The technique used involves fitting the house artfully onto the site, by careful observation of the site's natural features. Given that Savage's bungalow appears remarkably comfortably placed in its natural setting, it's most likely that this was the approach employed. Letting the site signal the design of a house was not something usually done back in town, where development occurred increasingly on the narrow, uniform lots that were becoming the industry norm. The process of 'tract development' was driven by consolidation of the building industry in the hands of contractors and developers who preferred standardized lot-widths, even if that meant blunter proximity to adjacent houses (because smaller lots allowed them to optimize real estate yields). This whole process tends towards sameness of design for neighbouring houses.

 

 

 

Vancouver, 1942: five of six new builds share identical features in their front facades

 

 

Many decades prior to Parker and Unwin extolling the advantages of a more naturalistic siting of houses, Uvedale Price, in his masterly Essays On The Picturesque (1842) had commented on the opportunity given an architect, in open countryside, to strengthen connections between building and surroundings by uniting the structure with "the general character of the scenery" and "with the particular spot and the objects immediately around it". Price felt that a building designed expressly for the countryside had unique potential to "do what has so seldom been done" by an architect: "accommodate his building to the scenery, not make that give way to his building". Achieving this outcome would require "an architect with a painter's eye, to have the planning of the whole". Should this condition be met, however, "many are the advantages, both with respect to the outside and to the inside, that might result from such a method...it is scarcely possible that a building formed on such a plan, should not be an ornament to the landscape, from whatever point it might be viewed". He contrasted the opportunity to build amid scenery with the buildings being constructed in cities, which perforce stood pretty much on top of one another, thus lacking opportunity to acknowledge the immediate scenery. In this sense, an urban approach to building houses contradicts their potential charm by impairing the relationship they might enjoy with their natural surroundings, should enough be allowed to remain. The modern process of gridding landscapes to maximize real estate yields tends to transform natural contours and vegetation into unwelcome encumbrances - things that are better removed in order to ready land for development. An extreme example of this subdivision-style layout, on lots of severely truncated width, appears in the photo below of a restored section of Vancouver's old West End. 

 

 

No room left over for residual landscape here

 

Subdivision plan, circa 1912, Quadra-Cloverdale: note the uniformity of lots

 

 

As an Arts and Crafts architect designing a house for his own family to use, Savage could implement the opposite notion simply by allowing the site's contours and scenery to guide his design. The actual ordering of rooms into sequences had to do with both their function and frequency of use, modified by the amount of light that could be gathered by placing them in specific locations with differing orientations. This prompted Savage to locate the bedrooms at the north end of the dwelling, while the more public spaces (living room, dining room, kitchen and rear porch) were placed to the south. Savage would have been comfortable too evolving elevations (the building as seen from outside) only after nailing down a prospective flow of rooms (or floor-plan). Foremost among the factors he would have considered was the opportunity of obtaining views to scenery as focused by window-placements. In the process of design Savage wasn't governed by a requirement for symmetry, so he could open windows wherever he deemed they would optimize light and take in views (relying again on his talent for 'informal grouping', as referenced in my first post in this series). Other architects in the Arts and Crafts tradition felt similar freedom to open windows wherever they would be beneficial: Harvey Ellis, for example, a talented architect and designer who wrote and designed houses for The Craftsman, regularly cited as his maxim "not symmetry, but balance."

 

Parker and Unwin continue thus: "The position of each room in relation to the points of the compass and the outlook should be determined on the spot." This is a key concept in an Arts and Crafts approach to design: the architect first familiarizes himself with the site's specifics, enabling a comprehension of its character that leads him to design a sympathetic structure. Necessarily, he would allow for the possibility of view corridors to inform both floor plan and the placement of windows. I believe that's just the approach Savage took to this pristine landscape. 

 

 

Bedrooms to the north (right) public rooms to the south (left): site-specific plans 

 

Well before the process of construction got under way, Savage would have been out on site, compass in hand to orient him, sketching prospective layouts and verifying possible placements and exposures. Looking around in sympathy with the stunning immediate and distant scenery, he would have considered how to minimize damage from construction while maximizing access to view corridors from inside. What a great problem for an Arts and Crafts architect to have! Parker and Unwin also declare: "...no sacrifice is too great which is necessary to enable us to bring plenty of sunshine into all the main living rooms." This statement, expressing a typically English sentiment, became obsessive once it was possible to fabricate larger areas of glass (Victoria has a similar rainy winter climate to England's). But this is also a universal sentiment perceived by those living far enough from the equator to feel an ongoing need for exposure to sunlight (or at least it was, until comparatively recently, when people stopped seeking light inside their homes and began paying obsessive attention to their electronic devices). Savage was also in the enviable position of building on an upland site, on a ridge bathed in sunshine with ample views. Parker and Unwin further elaborate on this topic of access to light and views: "But we do not today so much build shelters for people who live out of doors, as dwellings whence they may occasionally go forth. A primary consideration then must be, to so place the house as to afford its occupants the greatest possible enjoyment of such beauty of adjacent country or grandeur of distant view as the site can command. While doing this, however, we must place and design the house in such a way that it shall not stand out as a disturbing excrescence, but shall look at home in its site, in harmony with its surroundings." Or, as Price put it incisively decades earlier, so the house would be "an ornament to the landscape".

 

 

 Designed by an architect with a painter's eye, as an ornament to the landscape

 

Savage's half-acre gets more light than many another due to its substantial elevation (a fact of geography that modifies sun angles and allows light to reach further into rooms - especially in a house running south to north that is not actually very deep). Also, the site comes with ample views to distant large-scale scenery (the 'grandeur of distant views') such as the Olympic mountains across the straits of Juan de Fuca, or closer by, glimpses of Portage Inlet, an inland waterway that's part of what's today called the Salish Sea - atmospheric features that could be taken in at a glance from the principal windows of the bungalow. And recall that when Savage first built, there were no other buildings standing nearby, so nothing impeded him from exploiting those views. Parker and Unwin continue: "This consideration of the house as a detail in a larger picture will bring us to a determination of its general form, its treatment and its colouring. Some positions demand a lofty building, while others seem to suggest that it be kept as low as possible. And in the country, certainly, the low house is more successful, more in harmony with the scenery."

 

 

Savage wanted his bungalow to connect intimately with its natural setting

Same windows, from outside, showing lively movement in the wall planes

 

 

Savage took advantage of the natural aspects of this exceptionally well-endowed site. Rising elevation from the road and the building's placement along the ridge resulted in a structure with long walls facing east and west, which optimized the light reaching into rooms. As noted above, he was free to place windows wherever they would be advantageous, either for light or to open views or both, so he must have been intrigued by how this potential wall-porosity would shape the experience of the bungalow inside. Using windows, as singletons or in banks, to bring light into the interior, while capturing views to the scenery beyond, meant that the inhabitants were always directly connected to the immediate surroundings. Savage evidently shared Parker and Unwin's perspective on natural light, but he didn't have to make any sacrifices in design to bring it into the building. As a result, there are many different shapes, sizes, and treatments of windows in the Savage bungalow - some thirty-two in all (by my count), many of them substantial, in a house whose footprint is a scant 1600 square feet! A number of these windows are hinged casements, but more are generous double-hung sash windows (five feet high, on plan) which open and close easily due to counterweights hidden within their elegantly boxed frames. Both panes of glass open, so residents are able to exploit the 'stack effect', which optimizes cool air circulation on hot days (especially when the attic door is wide open, offering the hot air a whole other building level to rush into). Cumulatively, the windows are generously distributed (except for on the north face, where their presence is limited to two small panes of glass, one of which is in the attic) working to provide effects pretty much as intended.   

 

 

Small picture window in the conservatory looking out to the rear garden

Even in December's light, the view from the conservatory feels dramatic

The kitchen and other windows showing remarkable porosity of walls

Kitchen windows in May, with views to the protected back garden

Kitchen windows, rear door, conservatory windows seen from the garden

The charm of vista

In an authentic Arts and Crafts approach, the architect allows the sequence of interior spaces to develop out of the site itself, while exploring opportunities to open views to specific features (so as to exploit what Parker and Unwin term "the charm of vista"). They recommend that the living room, given its centrality, be placed optimally in order to garner maximum light: "The living room, as the most generally occupied, and therefore most important room, is placed at the south-east corner, having the double outlook to the south-east and south-west, and getting all available sunlight and the best of the prospect." As it transpired, this is pretty much where Savage placed his living room, with windows facing east (for morning light) and south (to bring in afternoon light). Of course, the living room doesn't occupy the full width of the structure (which, after all, is a small, artistic bungalow) sharing space with a dining room and the utility-room/rear porch, so it only receives indirect light from the west. But it is never dull in there!

 

 

Living room oaks in fall, pictured through wavy 'old' glass windows

 

 

 

Main bedroom, views to an oak forest from a bank of windows set in a bay

Visible front window shows how thin the house is

 

One result of Savage's configuration of windows is the ample light in all rooms, bar none. His bungalow was, after all, ideally situated to take in light, not at all deep (see photo above chronicling the bungalow's thinness) but long and oriented to enable light to penetrate it from both east and west. Indeed, he gave it so many significant windows that this light-gathering function is effectually accomplished. What follows are a few pictures that show just how well he succeeded in bringing natural light into the bungalow.

 

Morning light blasting into the entry foyer

January mid-day light blasting into the living room: virtues of a ridge site

 

Warm light reaching deep into a central corridor

 

January light blasting into the small dining room

 

 

Savage presumably worked through a flow of rooms and only then developed elevations for the bungalow. We can't be sure of this however, as no drawings of elevations have surfaced to date, making it harder to know for certain whether they came after he decided on a floor plan (certainly, however, this was the way Arts and Crafts architects tended to approach design). And the elevations as built do feel organic, blending seamlessly with the immediate context of the building (the cross-gables on the frontage, for example, appear to mimic the overall shape of the fir boughs visible behind the structure in what's now Marigold Park). We have to accept the possibility that there may only ever have been sketch-plans of the bungalow's exterior, the detailed design of which may have been worked out during construction with the highly skilled carpenters Savage used to build his home. The woodwork inside the building is absolutely flawless, a tribute to the skill of carpenters working with hand tools who knew what they were about. The same can be said of the bungalow's exterior, and the trio of cross-gables defining the main facade stands as a brilliant interpretation of bungalow form set cross-wise, on an upland ridge, in a truly picturesque landscape.

 

 

Brilliant articulation of bungalow form set cross-wise in a picturesque setting

 

Another view of the cross-gabled facade 

 

"We could" says Raymond Unwin, "if we really desired it, so arrange a new building site that it should not be an actual eye-sore, and might manage that it should have some little of the charm of the old village." One goal for Arts and Crafts architects was to fit new structures into existing landscape in ways that didn't result in a competition for attention, but actually embraced the landscape itself. The trick was to make the building feel so comfortable in its setting that it gave the impression of always having been there (rather than, say, remaking the landscape to fit an arbitrarily defined building lot, which is what we do today). The latter outcome, the result of town-development practices ("through not co-operating with the scene") treats the site without respect, as if all land were infinitely malleable, manipulable, and gradable. In a bona fide Arts and Crafts approach, the scenery is treated more respectfully, reverentially even, and as a result, the building comes to be "pleasing in the landscape".

 

 

A building fashioned consciously to appear 'pleasing in the landscape'

 

Elsewhere in Century Bungalow (in a post entitled The Romance of Possibility, August 2016) I commented on the charm and beauty of this site's natural contours, with its mature oaks front and back. It's an inherently picturesque landscape (an exceptional one too, despite being reduced from its original grandeur to the dimensions of an RS-6 lot) - a lot still magically protected by Savage's organic building placement. The architect with a painter's eye who first composed this scene took utmost care in his handling of the site, avoiding the re-contouring that excavation or grading would necessarily have entailed. This was, after all, Savage's chance, as a professional architect, to build a home for himself in a truly authentic Arts and Crafts manner, and perhaps one of only two instances as an architect where he got to shepherd a beguiling natural landscape through a complex building process while ensuring the site remained substantially undisturbed (another instance of the quality of work Savage was capable of is perhaps Stranton Lodge, a small nearby English Arts and Crafts cottage designed for his friends Thomas and Maud Hall in 1934, a building I hope to canvass more extensively later in this series of posts).

 

 

Stranton Lodge, by Hubert Savage, 1934, seen here in February 2018

 

 

Intriguingly, on the topic of naturalistic siting of new buildings, Savage's choice of the ridge as his building site just happened to align with Gustav Stickley's stated preferences for building placement, expressed in one of the essays in his compilation Craftsman Homes and Bungalows (1995 edition): "the hillside site, affording, as it does, well-nigh perfect drainage, makes it possible to put into effect a favourite Craftsman theory - that a house should be built without a cellar and should, as nearly as possible, rest directly on the ground with no visible foundation to separate it from the soil and turf in which it should almost appear to have taken root." This preference was akin to the manner of siting traditional English village churches, as pictured below.

 

 

All Saints, Brockhampton, by William Lethaby: a building rising from the land

 

Ridge sites come with natural advantages, including excellent drainage

 

 

Whether or not Savage was aware of Stickley's oeuvre, his approach to house-building as demonstrated by the Grange Road bungalow is remarkably consistent with what Stickley termed 'the Craftsman idea'. The house obviously benefits from its placement on the brow of a hill, and running it along the length of the ridge does indeed offer possibilities of, if not 'perfect', then at least very good, natural drainage. This results in a dwelling that seems to absorb the foundational ridge into its being.

 

"No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other."  Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect, in An Autobiography, 1932

 

 

Rainfall tends to run away from a building built on a ridge, in patterns readily discernible if an architect troubles to observe them (this would mean that the site is visited and absorbed into consciousness long before construction begins). If a house is well-contrived to disperse rainfall to ground (and many are not) good drainage is thereby assured. However, the Savage bungalow was also made to look 'settled into' the natural landscape, taking full advantage of the lay of the land (its 'contours and falls' in Barry Parker's poetic phrasing). On the west side, along the rear of the building, the house (borrowing words again from Stickley) "sits upon a foundation of field stone that is sunk so low as to be hardly perceptible, so that the house, while perfectly sanitary and well-drained, seems very close to the ground". Barry Parker, commenting on the layout of a traditional older building remarks "does not the old building seem almost to grow out of the ground on which it stands?" And that is just the way Savage designed his then-modern bungalow to appear.

 

 

The west and north facades appear to rest directly on the ground

 

Gustav Stickley, in various articles in The Craftsman, declared how enamoured he was of the exact building placement - near or directly sitting on the ground - that Savage evidently achieved at Grange Road. Of one such rural building, Stickley remarks: "as the general effect of the house is broad and low, it is fitting that very little of the foundation should be visible. A far better effect is given if no attempt is made to establish too strict a grade line, as the house seems to fit the ground much better if the foundation is accommodated to the natural irregularities..." Not emphasizing the presence of a stone foundation, except along the south wall where the contour of the land makes this a necessity, results in a building that feels well "accommodated to the natural irregularities" and as a result, seems to rise directly from the land (c.f. photos above and below). Even along the south wall, where the stone foundation is at its deepest, a rock outcrop that forms part of the protruding bedrock was made an integral part of the foundation.

 

"The point of the California bungalow was to get almost everything on one floor. Its exterior charm...was at least partly the result of the closeness of that floor to the ground. Good drainage of the soil...made it possible to put the little house on a very low foundation, thus emphasizing its mainly horizontal lines...The California bungalow seemed to hug the earth." Robert Winter, The California Bungalow

 

 

The front path follows the 'line of least resistance'

 

Bedrock incorporated into the foundation wall

 

In another of the essays in Craftsman Homes and Bungalows, Stickley promotes an idea for building placement that simultaneously functions as an approach to gardening intact natural landscapes, one involving modifying the natural context minimally (so more or less the exact opposite of the British form of estate gardening, which is, to put it mildly, more systematic). "Most fortunate is the home builder who can set his house out in the open where there is plenty of meadow land around it and an abundance of trees. If the ground happens to be uneven and hilly, so much the better, for the gardener then has the best of all possible foundations to start from and, if he be wise, he will leave it much as it is, clearing out a little here and there, planting such flowers and shrubs as seem to belong to the picture and allowing the paths to take the directions that would naturally be given to footpaths across the meadows or through the woods - paths which invariably follow the line of least resistance and so adapt themselves perfectly to the contour of the ground". Stickley's method here is consistent with a North American Arts and Crafts approach to gardening natural landscapes (something few Europeans would have experienced in the old world, because it was so long-inhabited and accordingly much-modified). I'm convinced the Savages took exactly this approach to evolving their little patch of heaven during their long tenure there. The course of the front path evidently follows Stickley's 'line of least resistance' through the landscape (see top photo, above) and as a result, feels snugly fitted to the land's natural contours. This approach results in an entry path traversing the entire front facade before accessing a switchback path, followed by a flight of steps, that finally arrives at a sheltered verandah. From the outset, and for many years thereafter, the final steps up to the verandah were of wood (c.f. 1933 floor plan, where the steps are still identified as being wooden); however, by the time Savage drew up a second floor plan, back in 1951, the switchback and the steps leading to the verandah had been rebuilt as broad, curving stone stairs, appearing today pretty much as they do in the photo below. The stone steps have a decidedly more impressive effect than wooden steps would have had.

 

 

Curving stone stairs complete the switchback path

 

Books for looks:

The Art of Designing A Home, Robert Parker and Raymond Unwin, 1901. 

The English Vision, The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design, David Watkin, 1982. Watkin makes a strong case for the convergence of picturesque notions of landscape with Arts and Crafts architecture, especially in chapter 5, The Picturesque House: Vanbrugh to Soane; and chapter 6, The Picturesque House: Salvin to Lutyens. Of Edward Lutyens he says: "Lutyens was the last and perhaps the greatest exponent of the Picturesque. Whether he would have immediately recognized himself in that description is unclear, but there can be no doubt that his sensitivity to local materials, his love of irregular massing, and his concern to relate the plan and the form of a house to its setting both natural and man-made, were deeply part of everything we have described as picturesque." (147). Lutyens was perhaps the greatest Arts and Crafts architect to practice in Britain, and he enjoyed a long-standing partnership with Gertrude Jekyll, an Arts and Crafts garden designer.

Essays on the Picturesque, Uvedale Price, 1842.

Craftsman Homes and Bungalows, Gustav Stickley, 1996 edition.

The California Bungalow, Robert Winter, 1980. 

The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, by Christopher Hussey, 1967