Red House

Throughout its existence people have sought the right words to describe Red House. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote that: "It is a most noble work in every way, and more a poem than a house…but an admirable place to live in too". It was he who, while the house was being built, called it the ‘The Towers of Topsy’ and wrote that it "was a real wonder of the age… that baffles all description". Nearly a hundred years later, Sir Hugh Casson, in a radio broadcast, vividly described approaching it and seeing the house "suddenly rearing up like a miniature Camelot of turrets and steeply crested roofs".

William Morris and his friends, particularly Edward Burne-Jones (Ned) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had been considering the possibility of a brotherhood, some monastic order or college for a number of years. Morris, who was the only one with the money to realise these dreams, brought these ambitions together with his desire, having courted and married Jane Burden, to move from the "dream of an idyllic earth, of a monastery or art-brotherhood" to the construction of a "perfect medieval kind of house, a noble and happy enclosure in a dark world, where he would be able to create his own way of life with his wife and their children… "

The house had started to appear as a reality in August 1858 when Webb and Morris discussed it during a boat trip on the Seine. Webb made a preliminary sketch for the staircase of the House on the back of one of the maps in Murray’s Guide to France. Filled with enthusiasm, they spent the remainder of the summer looking for sites, and Morris started buying antiques to fill it. By the time Morris and Jane Burden married in April the following year, the plans for the house were complete and work started soon after. By the following spring the couple were able to move into nearby Aberleigh Lodge to oversee the work and then finally occupy Red House in the June of 1860.

Modern visitors to the house, possibly struck, or even horrified, by the vivid contrast between the still existing rural idyll within the old walls and the modern suburban environment, ask why Morris would have chosen to live there. Upton, now Bexleyheath, was then a small hamlet in "the rose-hung lanes of woody Kent". Morris had a preference for the landscape of this county; it was relatively accessible to London (by a three mile wagon trip and a one-hour train journey; the site had a mature orchard, with eighty different types of trees; and the land was cheap. Additionally, there were strong medieval overtones with the Pilgrim’s Way to Canterbury from London passing nearby.

The internal plan of the house was unusual for the time having two main living rooms – the Drawing Room and the Studio – on the first floor along with some bedrooms.  The ground floor contained the large hall (which was also used for eating), the dining room, the library and morning room as well as an unusually large kitchen.

The house is L-shaped with a high tower at the centre. The slightly forbidding front, with its large gothic-arched porch faces North. The long west wall is interrupted by an oriel window, boldly corbelled out from a massive buttress and a striking counterpoint to the great chimney stack. At the south end, a huge dormer window with its own hipped roof rises from an uninterrupted roof slope to light what was originally the maids’ dormitory. Moving around to the East, there is the well court, with a well house with a tall conical roof reminiscent of a Kentish oast house.

The impact on anyone visiting the house is always emphatic if sometimes mixed. It is well summarised by Fiona MacCarthy when she says, in her biography of Morris, that the house "is plain and functional, beautiful and homely…also playful, willful…a touching design, childlike, a house in the Dutch toy-town Morris played with as a boy." For the modern visitor, Gay Daly concludes that: "Today Red House looks like a dream, a fairy castle in a child’s story, but the simplicity of its design and the lack of ornament make it quiet, almost austere, rather than sentimental or cute".