This was the sitting room of my parents-in-law’s home, with its green settees in a perpendicular cabin bench style, with fitted cupboards underneath all homemade. The plush green seat cushions were tied in with the complementary coloured and delicately textured rich red wallpaper. These elements formed a room displaying home-spun talent and a perfect example of modernist interior design.
The right-angled style was not without controversy, as my late mother-in-law would regularly snag her stockings on her husband’s “sharp corners”. However, the space-saving precision of this fitted project was entirely necessary as the room had to seat a large family and accommodate their belongings.
This short essay touches on the origin of the green settee and its place in what is considered the canon of modernist design. This essay will also briefly seek to ‘place’ the actual room the green settee was in with regard to the home’s social and political context.
In his essay on the gleaming modernist bedroom of Carey Ross, photographed by Walker Evans in 1932, Cultural commentator Oliver Richon purports that, “. it is well known, the key subject of Evans’ documentary style is the vernacular, a term which could stand in opposition to modernism.” (Richon 2011 p.130) This fluid conjecture forms the crux of my interest in this home. The decoration in the room I have photographed was produced through materials gathered from industrial and commercial – rather than designer- sources and applied to a former council house. The style emulates that of interior designers of the late 1960s and early 1970s and their wealthy clients, and although it was not a commission in the established sense it was constructed with at least the same care and professionalism; my father-in-law was a shopfitter and joiner and my mother-in-law a seamstress.
Indeed, Richon asserts “Le Corbusier’s villas would reference the vernacular architecture of North America as much as industrial anonymous structure”, (Richon 2011 p.130). In this case, the referent, or semiological signified is that of commercial buildings that my father-in-law worked on, including banks, building societies, shops and showrooms.
This Brighton council built and run home was one of the ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ in the aftermath of the First World War; part of a huge expansion of reconstruction and better-quality housing to improve workers lives and help thwart revolution. According to Historian S. Martin Gaskill “It was clear that after the war the private enterprise.. [and associated private house building].. would be conducted under great difficulties because of high prices and the shortage both of labour and materials” (Gaskell, 1986 p.150).
The Housing Committee Report produced by Liberal MP Sir John Tudor Walter’s, just after the end of hostilities, (reaching statute in 1919 and became known as the ‘housing manual’), laid down a revolutionary approach to state housing provision both in architectural terms and in terms of the expansive provision around the country. The report was intended to be used for the design, layout and control of local authority housing schemes. Architect, Professor Mark Swenarton, states “By building new houses to a standard previously reserved for the middle classes, the government would demonstrate to the people just how different their lives were going to be in the future”, (Swenarton, 1981 p.86). The scheme was radical and housing density was suggested to be of the scale of “twelve houses to the acre.. in urban areas”, (Gaskell, 1986 p.85). These schemes are now designated by Brighton City Council as ‘low density’ housing, such is the pressure on land and the changes city planning, today.
In the period immediately following the First World War the Local Government Board at the time claimed “Any improvement. [in housing standards], such as the provision of a bathroom or parlour, the board argued, would lead to an increase in cost that would have to be borne by the Exchequer and should therefore be resisted as far as possible” (Swenarton, 1981 p.89). So, if the Board had had its way, the room or ‘parlour’ with the ‘Green Settee’ would not have come into being. Its modernist tone, which I think, competes for attention with the work of high-brow architects, would fail to be recognized for what it is; that is a working-class rebuttal, a modernist intervention versus the vernacular, now sadly lost to us.
References:
Gaskell, S, M. (1986) Model Housing: From The Great Exhibition To The Festival Of Britain, London, Mansell Publishing Ltd
Richon, O. (2011) Walker Evans: Carey Ross’s Bedroom, photographies, 4:1 pp 117-133
Swenarton, M (1981) Homes Fit For Heroes: The Politics and Architecture of Early State Housing in Britain, London, Heinemann Educational Books