Hubert Savage, Architect (2)

 

 

The instinct for beauty 

 

 

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

 

Many architects helped shape British Arts and Crafts architecture, but there were recurring themes: building in ways typical of the locale, with local materials, was one (timber or stone sourced directly from the site intensified the effect); shaping a new house to suit the site, by drawing design-leads directly from the topography and scenery, was another; integrated design of all details, including interior finishes and decor, in order to obtain a unified outcome, was a third. Construction based on these principles, executed by highly skilled craftsmen, was how to go about producing a building that was authentic. These were not the only themes followed by Arts and Crafts architects, but they were among the most universally applied. Foremost among those who shaped this direction in the early twentieth century were Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin - architects working in a shared practice who were selected to design the first-ever Garden City (at Letchworth, some thirty miles north of London). The ideas galvanizing the Garden Cities movement came from the pen of Ebenezer Howard (Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1902). Parker and Unwin first came to public attention by authoring an influential book entitled The Art of Building A Home (1901) which advocated techniques that were steeped in the Arts and Crafts perspective. The pair were later invited by Gustav Stickley, editor and convener of The Craftsman (an influential American Arts and Crafts magazine) to recast the book as a series of articles for publication in the magazine. Barry Parker, in an 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 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 for Arts and Crafts architects that a pristine site could yield important design-cues, enabling a house to fuse more fully with its setting. This was a precept Savage undoubtedly knew about, and one his particular situation of designing a dwelling for personal use amid unspoiled nature allowed him to fully implement. In the creative act of designing a bungalow for himself and wife Alys, he was blessed to have a picturesque setting with a defining ridge surrounded by old oaks. Parker goes on to suggest how to turn the unique qualities of the setting to full 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 specifics of the site was just what Savage had in mind for his new bungalow, with the overall aim of raising a building that fitted the physical circumstances as a hand does a glove.

 

 

Picturesque English cottage in Selworthy, Summerset, 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 here was the forging of a bond between house and setting, so they became so indissolubly linked that they appeared to have been made for one another. The same naturalistic approach to siting was taken in the layout of traditional English villages, or even for individual cottages (see photo above, noting how the cottage steps down the land). The technique involves fitting a house artfully onto its site, chiefly by close observation of its natural features. Given that the Savage bungalow appears remarkably comfortably placed in its natural setting, it's most likely that this was the approach that was taken. Letting the site signal the design of a house wasn't as easily done back in town, where development tended to occur on the narrow, more uniform lots that were rapidly becoming the industry norm. The process of 'tract development' was driven by consolidation of the building industry in the hands of contractor-developers who preferred to standardize lot-widths, even if that meant blunter proximity to the adjacent houses (smaller lot sizes allowed the optimization of real estate yields). This whole process tends to result in a sameness of design for neighbouring houses.

 

 

 

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

 

 

Many decades prior to Parker and Unwin's extolling the advantages of naturalistic siting of houses, Uvedale Price, in his masterly Essays On The Picturesque (1842) commented on the opportunity given an architect, building in open countryside, to strengthen connections between the building and its 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 any 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 of building in the midst of scenery with the houses that were being put up in cities, standing pretty much on top of each another, so that they lacked any opportunity to acknowledge their immediate surroundings. In this sense, the urban approach to building contradicts the potential charm of houses by impeding the relationship they could develop with their surroundings, should sufficient context be allowed to remain. The modern process of gridding landscapes to maximize yields tends to transform natural contours and vegetation into unwelcome encumbrances - things that are best 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 next photo, of a restored section of Vancouver's old West End. 

 

 

No room left over for residual scenery in Vancouver

 

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

 

 

As an Arts and Crafts architect designing a house for family use, Savage could implement the opposite notion simply by allowing the site's contours and scenery to guide his choices. The actual ordering of rooms into sequences had to do with both their function and the frequency of their use, as modified by the amount of light that could be gathered by putting them in specific locations. This prompted Savage to place the bedrooms towards 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 likely have been comfortable evolving the elevations (the building as seen from outside) only after he nailed down the flow of rooms (or floor-plan). Foremost among the factors he would have considered was the opportunity to obtain views to scenery by means of the placement of windows. In this process, Savage wasn't governed by requirements for symmetry, so he could open a window wherever he needed one (relying on his talent for "informal grouping", which was mentioned in my first post in this series). Other architects in the Arts and Crafts tradition felt a similar freedom to open windows wherever they were 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: "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 of house design: the architect first familiarizes himself with the site's specifics, enabling him to comprehend its character, which can then lead him to design a sympathetic structure. Necessarily, he would allow for the possibility of view corridors informing both floor plan and the placing of windows. I believe that's just the approach Savage took to building in a pristine landscape. 

 

 

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

 

Well before the process of construction would have begun, Savage would have been out on site, compass in hand, sketching prospective layouts and verifying potential placements and exposures. Looking around in full sympathy with the stunning immediate and distant scenery, he would have considered how to minimize the damage from construction while maximizing the access to view corridors from inside the bungalow. 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, had become an obsession once it became possible to fabricate larger areas of glass (given a rainy winter climate). But this was also a universal sentiment among those living far enough from the equator to feel the ongoing need to be exposed to sunlight. Savage was also in the enviable position of building on an upland site, on a ridge bathed in sunshine, with abundant views. Parker and Unwin further elaborate on 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 appear as "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, allowing light to reach further into the rooms - especially in a house running south to north that also is not 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 now known as 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 anywhere nearby, so nothing impeded him from exploring 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 the natural setting

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

 

 

Savage took advantage of the natural aspects of an 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 were advantageous, so he must have been intrigued by how this wall-porosity would shape the experience inside. Using windows, as singletons or clustered in banks, to admit light to the interior while capturing views to scenery kept the inhabitants directly connected to their immediate surroundings. Savage evidently shared Parker and Unwin's perspective on natural light, but he didn't have to make sacrifices in order 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 windows in all (by my count), many of them substantial, in a house whose footprint of under 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 the counterweights hidden behind their elegantly trimmed frames. Both panes of glass thus open, so residents are able to explore the "stack effect", which optimizes cool air circulation on hotter days (especially if the attic door is open as well, giving hot air a whole other building level to rush into). Cumulatively, the windows are generously distributed (except for the north face, where their presence is limited to two small panes of glass, one of which is just an end window in the attic) and work to provide their intended effects.   

 

 

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 the 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 the opportunities to open views to specific features (so as to exploit what Parker and Unwin call "the charm of vista"). They recommend that the living room, given its centrality, be placed optimally 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 (for afternoon light). Of course, the living room doesn't occupy the full width of the building (which, after all, is just a small, artistic bungalow) sharing space with the dining room and the utility-room/rear porch, so it only gets 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 actually is

 

One result of Savage's configuration of windows is the ample light harvested in all rooms. His bungalow was, after all, ideally situated to take in natural light, not at all deep (see photo above showing the building's thinness) but long and oriented so that sunlight penetrates it from both east and west. Indeed, he gave it so many significant windows that the light-gathering function is effectually accomplished. What follows are a few pictures showing 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 building elevations have surfaced to date, making it harder to know for sure whether they came after he settled the floor plan (certainly, however, this was the way Arts and Crafts architects tended to approach design of buildings). And the elevations as built do feel organic, blending seamlessly with the building's immediate context (the cross-gables on the frontage, for example, seem to mimic the shape of the fir boughs visible behind the structure in 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 actual construction. The woodwork inside the building is absolutely flawless, a tribute to the skill of the carpenters working only with hand tools who obviously knew what they were doing. The same can be said of the bungalow's exterior, and the trio of cross-gables defining the main facade stand 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 site itself. The trick lay in making the building feel so comfortable in its setting that it gives 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 with zero 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 by design 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 the 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 that's still magically protected by Savage's original 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 have entailed. This was, after all, Savage's one 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 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 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 in a subsequent post).

 

 

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 a building site happened to align with Gustav Stickley's preferences for building placement, as expressed in one of the essays in Craftsman Homes and Bungalows (1995 edition): "the hillside site, affording...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 way of siting traditional English village churches, which was followed by Arts and Crafts architect William Lethaby at All Saints church, pictured below.

 

 

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

 

Ridge sites come with natural advantages, which include superior drainage

 

 

Whether Savage was aware of Stickley's writings or not, his approach to house-building is remarkably consistent with "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 that are readily discernible if an architect has the time to observe them (this would mean that the site is visited and absorbed into consciousness long before construction starts). If a house is well-contrived to disperse rainfall to ground (which many are not) good drainage is pretty much 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 back of the building, the house (borrowing 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 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 achieved at Grange Road. Of one such rural building, Stickley comments: "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 by keeping it low (except along the south wall where the contour of the land makes it necessary) results in a building that feels well "accommodated to the natural irregularities" and as a result, appears to rise directly from the land (see photos above and below). Even along the south wall, where the stone foundation is deeper, a boulder that forms part of the protruding bedrock was made integral to 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 following the "line of least resistance"

 

Boulder incorporated into the foundation wall

 

In another of the essays in Craftsman Homes and Bungalows, Stickley promotes an idea for building placement that simultaneously expresses an approach to gardening natural landscapes, one involving modifying the 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 the gardening of natural landscapes (something few Europeans would have experienced at home, because Europe was inhabited for eons and therefore the landscape was much-modified). I'm convinced the Savages took exactly this sort of approach, evolving their little patch of heaven during a 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 into the land's natural contours. This approach results in an entry path traversing the entire front facade before accessing a switchback and a flight of steps, which finally arrive on the sheltered verandah. From the outset, and for many years thereafter, the final steps up to the verandah were made of wood (cf. 1933 floor plan, where the steps are still identified as being made of wood); however, by the time Savage came to do up a second floor plan, in 1951, the switchback and the steps leading to the verandah had been remade as broad, curving stone steps, appearing today pretty much as they do in the photo below. The stone steps make a decidedly more impressive impression than wooden steps would have made.

 

 

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, the premier 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