Houses of the Art Deco years

© 2004 Jean Gardner

Millions of houses, built at the height of the Art Deco period in the Twenties and Thirties, dominate the suburbs of Britain. Maligned for so long as 'commuterland', they are only just beginning to be appreciated for their distinctive styles and successful contribution to British housing.

Indoors, to many people, Art Deco is typified by boldly coloured china, jewellery and furnishings which are now collectables.

Outdoors, the larger suburban buildings such as streamlined cinemas, are more likely to attract immediate attention, though many have been adapted for other uses, such as bingo halls. But millions of contemporary houses, which were strongly influenced by the Art Deco styles, survive as the comfortable, welcoming homes they were intended to be.

The term 'Art Deco', originates from an exhibition of decorative arts held in Paris in 1925, when art movements from many countries displayed their creations in twelve exotic pavilions. The chief requirement was that the designs should be innovative. Consequently the displays varied enormously with contrasting characteristics vying for attention. Symmetrical and asymmetrical designs stood side by side. Stylised motifs and bright colours were common, together with zig-zags and abstract geometric patterns.

Moorish and Aztec Indian influences prevailed but were strongly challenged by those based on Japanese art. After the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen in 1921, Egyptian styles became highly fashionable and were the highlight of the 1925 Wembley Exhibition.The great liners which sailed across the Atlantic provided a nautical influence. Their streamlined wrap around windows and flat canopies are a feature of Modernism, while portholes are found in every style of building. At the same time the principles of Art Deco designs were soon applied to housing, with Moorish arches and nautical windows appearing on the expanding suburban estates.

The Twenties saw the first owner occupier housing boom in Britain. People finally had the opportunity to express their individuality and aspirations through their homes, which resulted in some stunning new designs. The most fanciful of architects' dreams remained the province of those who could afford to commission a house to their own specification. Mass market builders were faced with the same dilemma then as now, how to design and build homes within a realistic price range that would appeal to all prospective buyers. Their attempts can be seen in the suburbs of most towns.

Two schools of thought persisted among architects in Britain - those in the majority who essentially reworked traditional styles and the pioneering Modernists who produced plain functional designs.

Cautious buyers wanted traditional homes yet they wanted something new. The speculative builders' answer was usually a mixture of Mock Tudor and Modernism which could be secured for a deposit of £25 and a repayment of under a pound a week. The average yearly wage of a bank clerk in 1925 was £200. The suburbs were essentially dormitory areas. The men went into town each day to work in banks, insurance companies and other 'white collar' jobs. Their wives remained at home caring for the house and children, with local parades of shops catering for everyday needs. The Underground Railway was the focus of London's suburbs with many stations advertised as only a few minutes from the West end. In other towns the increasingly reliable omnibuses served the new communities.

The housebuilders of the Twenties and Thirties strove to create a distinct 'countryside in the town' atmosphere. The emphasis was on family life where home and hearth rivalled fresh air and healthy living for precedence. Countless families had gardens for the first time. Trees and grass verges lined many of the new suburban roads. Laburnum Avenue, Woodfield Drive and similar names evoked a green and pleasant land in which to live. Today these suburbs are encompassed by ever widening rings of newer housing and have lost their original country atmosphere. Millions of people live in them without realising that they could be in the historic house business in a few years time.

The Art Deco era, when some of the outstanding twentieth century buildings were erected, is now recognised as an historic period. More and more of the individually designed houses are being listed and at least one road on an estate of semi-detached houses has a preservation order on it. House builders are already re-working house designs of the Twenties and Thirties, which is concrete evidence that they are counted as historic.

The suburbs which characterised those years are an enduring symbol of the way Art Deco architecture affected the life of the ordinary 'man in the street.' They have taken their place as historic in their own right, and their owners are beginning to nurture the period aspect of their homes with the same pride as people who live in Victorian and Georgian houses.

Re-worked traditional styles and Modernist buildings both evolved during the time when Art Deco was at the height of fashion. The growing custom of including all the artefacts and architecture of the Twenties and Thirties under the Art Deco label is misleading, particularly where housing is concerned. Houses constructed in those years are more accurately described as 'houses built during the Art Deco period than Art Deco Houses.' But whatever they are called, few fail to reflect the Art Deco styles in some way.

DOORS AND PORCHES

The entrance, the focal point of houses throughout history, remained the principle feature of most homes built during the Art Deco period. The porch enticed visitors by drawing attention to the door, and secondly afforded them shelter. It was never closed in to present a blind front until central heating became widespread in the 1960s. Since then many have been filled in with a second door which keeps cold air at bay but sends out signals of rejection to callers.

Doors of numerous styles were incorporated in Art Deco houses, but the contemporary emphasis on family life demanded a symbol of welcome, and here the Moorish influence prevailed. For centuries the dark archways penetrating the white walls of Mediterranean houses have represented an invitation to enter. The Moorish arch is the basic shape of the majority of porches of the Art Deco era but it appears in many guises. They range from the simple semicircle, through to keyholes, with one, two, three, and occasionally four, orders of brick arches around them, some running right down to the ground, others just over the curved section. Many are divided in two by a central keystone which dates back to Classical times. Some are outlined by brick or stone, or have a smooth rendered surround, to draw attention to them.

The prize for the doorway with the most orders around it should probably go to one in Heath Side, Hampstead which has no less than eight rectangular arches enclosing a fully glazed metal door with a geometric design.

Keyhole shaped doorways emulate a style established in the Moorish buildings around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. The colonnade surrounding the courtyards of such buildings inspired some architects to place the front door within a row of three or more arches. Examples of this are found in reworked traditional style brick houses while others breach the white rendered walls of Modernist homes.

Deep porches with semi-circular tops or a full half circular arch enclose front doors in dozens of designs, but sometimes a shallow arch is purely decorative. One such on a bungalow at Southmoor, Oxfordshire, is a generous fifteen feet wide but only a few inches deep. It encompasses a symmetrical door and window arrangement set in gleaming white walls broken by red tiled window sills which complement the red roof tiles.

The contrasting styles of the times intermingle without restraint. A Moorish arch may well embrace a Tudor style solid wooden door with a lift up latch or strap hinges from the same era. Other solid wood doors are heavily studded in the manner of those in the Mediterranean where the larger the number of studs in the door, the more affluent the inhabitants.

Frequently a small window pierces a door to allow callers to be inspected before admittance. Fashionable in Tudor and Jacobean times and reappearing in the Twenties and Thirties, were tiny 'eyes' flanking doors, in other words small windows on either side of the door.

The reworking of Classical styles, which had already happened once during the renaissance period, appears again on Neo-Georgian buildings of the Art Deco years. Doors flanked by pilasters or columns, and surmounted by pediments, embellish quite modest homes. But whereas Georgian architects endeavoured to keep to the strict proportions and details of one style, motifs from the simple Ionic, the Doric and the more elaborate Corinthian orders are freely combined on Art Deco housing.

Classical doors were often identified by their panels, which might number as many as ten. The style was revived during the 17th century and lingers on. By Victorian times the number of panels had dropped to four and architects favoured doors with two short panels at the bottom, a low handle and two long panels above.

The speculative builders of the Art Deco era often used panelled doors but preferred those with the long panels below a shoulder height handle, topped by two short panels. In keeping with the bold bright colours of the Jazz Age the panels were painted in two colours and window frames received the same treatment. Painting the house was time consuming because the different colours were picked out on all the narrow beadings. The fashion for fresh air and country living meant that green and cream was the most popular pairing, followed by red, or orange, and white.

Glass sometimes replaced the top panels. The windows round, oval, square, or formed from the small panels considered smart by the Arts and Crafts movement of the late Victorian days, usually had frosted glass or leaded lights. Stylised flowers enhanced millions of such lights, with country scenes, or galleons forever sailing across a bright blue sea in the houses of the better off. Some suburban estates have flotillas of boats sailing in perpetuity along entire roads.

The mock Regency look is rarely found in large numbers of houses but individual ones and pairs were built. Where doors are concerned, Regency is the most hard to distinguish from late Georgian types. But, where most Georgian doors had straight lintels, by Regency times arched tops had become popular. However, the Regency pagoda is unmistakable. Curved sheets of metal, supported by a frame, sheltered anything from a door to an entire verandah.

The Modernist school of architects, who mainly designed individual luxury houses, created doors from a variety of materials. They ranged from chromium-plated to polished wood and fully glazed metal frames. But the one thing they had in common was lack of decoration. Form and function were the essence of Modernism.

These ideas filtered down to suburban estates as doors comprising of four or five fully glazed panels of opaque glass, one above the other which were effectively a single sheet of glass and made for a very light hall. But they were the bane of postmen and delivery boys, who found letterboxes at ground level back breaking.

The Modernists' keenness for glazed doors opening onto roof terraces, or from all the main rooms into the garden, resulted in houses with up to six doors opening to the outside. The speculative builders' version of this is seen as French doors leading to the garden or a door leading to a small balcony, often with a curved end. The balcony was of little practical use but did allow light into the house and easy access to fresh air.

Placing a pair of doors within an arch was also fashionable. Often they formed the entire front wall of the hall to allow fresh air to flow into the house in line with contemporary ideas about healthy living. Fully circular 'moon' doorways are an Oriental feature reflecting the Japanese influence and are seldom seen on the creations of speculative builders.

A porch or a canopy to shelter the door was considered essential for every home. Canopies were often streamlined, with curved corners, smaller versions of those found on cinemas, which in turn imitated those on great liners. But distant cultures are brought to mind when Aztec chevrons are included in the door and window glazing under a canopy. Moulded concrete canopies appeared on Modernist houses. Simple versions were flat semi-circles above the front door. More elaborate were those with shaped corners and most unusual the asymmetrical designs such as those at Haywards Heath, which have a single flat concrete wall on one side curving over the entrance and stopping about six feet from the ground resulting in a hook shaped finish.

Simply setting the door in a recess and adding a few inches of projecting canopy to produce a sheltered area formed some porches. The Dutch were leading architects of the day. Their contribution has come down as curvilinear pediments giving height to porches, which appear in brick with stone trim or have a smooth rendered finish.

Miniature versions of the main roof, be it hipped, or gabled, with flat boards on the underside, surmount other porches. Gabled porch roofs were less popular although they lent themselves to being filled in at the sides thus providing extra protection from the elements, without obscuring the door.

The earlier custom of having halls adjoining in the centre of a pair of houses was abandoned in favour of having the living rooms separating the entrances to enhance the privacy of the owners.

Many of the potential customers were buying a house for the first time. The builders of suburban estates, concerned only with attracting as many buyers as possible, mixed architectural details with abandon in order to appeal to all tastes. The mixture of contrasting styles is well illustrated by a doorway in Bloomfield Road, Harpenden. The small leaded window in the solid wooden door is patterned with Aztec chevrons, and the small matching windows on either side are reminiscent of the 'eyes' of mediaeval times. An arch with four orders is emphasised by decorative brickwork which continues as a band drawing attention to the horizontal line. The arch is echoed by the fan shaped doorstep which is also in decorative brick and the path itself is the latest in crazy paving. But prospective home owners were not so concerned with the external appearance of the houses, for them the most important element of all was having their own front door.

The book continues with chapters about windows, mock Tudor, decorative brickwork, modernism, public housing, roofs and chimneys, metalwork, and gardens.

There are over 100 black and white illustrations.

Houses of the Art Deco Years, Braiswick ISBN 1 898030 71 5 £9.50