Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In 1858, William Morris, a 24-year-old architectural draughtsman with some family money, bought an acre of land in what is now the south-east London suburb of Bexleyheath, then still rural Kent. Morris commissioned his friend and colleague Philip Webb to design a family house that embodied his beliefs about the honesty of medieval building styles and techniques. Working together, the two men created an asymmetric arrangement of steep roofs and jutting gables hung with red clay tiles, drawing on Gothic French churches and English farmhouses. Many of the motifs we think of as pattern-book Arts and Crafts movement — of which Morris would become a leading proponent — such as exposed timber and brickwork in the interiors or improving mottos carved over doorways and fireplaces, came together in the house. When it was completed in 1860, the Morrises and their tight circle of Pre-Raphaelite bohemian friends — including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal and Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones, embarked on an extended house-painting party. They covered walls and ceilings with pattern and illustration, firing tiles, embroidering tapestries and making furniture and stained glass. The builders were instructed to leave the scaffolding up in the central staircase so the group could work in shifts painting a simplified blue and green basket-weave motif.The bold spareness of many of the patterns is an antithesis to the intricacy of the fabric and wallpaper designs that Morris would later become best known for as the most influential designer of his age. A geometric pattern of yellow circles painted in a dormer window seems 100 years ahead of its time. “I always see it as that kind of coming of age for Morris, where he had that freedom to be a little bit different,” says Elly Bagnall, the National Trust’s house and gardens manager in charge of Red House. “I think this was where he did all that exploring and kind of soul-seeking that you do as a 25-year-old.”The Morrises and their coterie worked and played happily in the house; there were apple fights with the fruit from the orchard in the grounds. Morris’s earliest wallpaper patterns, with names such as Daisy and Trellis, were inspired by the view of the garden from his studio window.The idyll lasted five years. In 1864 the Burne-Jones’ son Christopher died in infancy and the couple stopped visiting Red House. Morris’s four-year-old interiors business, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co — whose founding was partly a result of his work on the house — was growing and the daily three-hour commute to central London wore him down. The family moved to live above the company offices in Bloomsbury and sold the house at a loss.After passing through several different hands, the house was home to Edward Hollamby for the second half of the 20th century; he oversaw some of London’s boldest public housing in the 1960s and 1970s. His built-in teak architect’s desk remains as a mid 20th-century anomaly in the vaulted studio. After Hollamby’s death, the National Trust took on the house in 2003, stabilising it and carefully cutting spy holes though later decorative schemes to show the original patterns.The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described Morris’s shift into furnishings as “the beginning of a new era in western art”. He argued that it legitimised interior design as a focus for artists’ talent and led directly to movements such as the Bauhaus 70 years later. Red House is important not just for its bravura design and decoration but as the crucible of that shift.nationaltrust.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
