Decorative Electricity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes It has been suggested that Standen was the first country house built with electricity designed into it from the off, and as such, it was subject to an exhibition at the Science Museum in London. Other houses have also been suggested, including Hewell Grange, Worcs, 1883 which may have had electricity from beginning. However, Michael Hall has pointed out that there is a reference to the date of installing the electrical system, in an elevation of one of the internal walls of the hall, made by Drake and Gorham, Electrical Engineers, London, dated 8 August 1889, the designs for the house were completed in 1883 and work began in 1884, so perhaps electricity was not planned right from start? The earliest visual records for the interior by the photographer Bedford Lemere show electricity in the not yet entirely completed house in 1891-2, but there is nothing to indicate it in a large undated presentation watercolour of the interior of the hall c.1884. I am grateful to David Beevers for showing me Michael Hall's letter on this subject of 1993. Other houses suggested include Dawpool (1882-4) and Jill Franklin in The Gentleman's Country House and its Plan, 1835-1914 (1981) states that Smallwood Manor, Staffs (1886) was one of four examples of houses built for electricity from the start, with light fittings designed by RW Edis. Certainly there is clear evidence, including original drawings by Webb in the R.I.B.A. study collection (PB 88 Webb Citation42 58 & 59), Webb's letter to Mrs Beale on 7 July 1894 and in his notebooks that electric lighting at Standen was planned from the start and even if it was not the first, it was a very early and extensive example of designing specifically for electricity. Cragside, Northumberland, the country seat of Sir William Armstrong has been consistently cited as the first country house to have electricity installed in 1880. One of the two key figures in the development of electric lighting, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan stated in the letter to John Worsnop that ‘So far as I know Cragside was the first house in England properly fitted with my electric lights’. Swan's own house had electric lighting fitted in the drawing room in June 1880. For a wider discussion of Mrs J.E.H. Gordon, Decorative Electricity with a chapter on Fire Risks by J.E.H. Gordon, BA, M.Inst. C.E., (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington Ltd., 1891) see Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Expertise, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880-1914, (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008) and Graeme Gooday, ‘Illuminating the Expert-Consumer Relationship in Domestic Electricity’, in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds.), Science in the Marketplace, Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 231-70. Graeme Gooday proposes in his exploration of the ‘taming’ of this new power, that the move to electricity was not one of a simple teleology of progress to modernity, as has been suggested in previous literature on the subject. He says that ‘electrification is a problematic concept because we cannot take for granted that all social spaces are bound at some point to incorporate electricity’, and sees the close link of this to notions of modernity and modernization as misleading (Gooday “Domesticating Electricity” 14). Hammond's book is discussed extensively in Gooday “Domesticating Electricity” 112-4. Holland Park had become a gathering place for a number of such families, and Philip Webb had already had some success with his commissions for there. Number 1, designed for Greek Consul General, Alexander Ionides, was described in all its decorative detail as ‘A Kensington Interior’ in the Art Journal in May 1893, just as Webb was in the midst of his work at Standen. For example, Webb's notebooks of June 1892, detail a trip he took with Mr Garrett, the builder, to East Grinstead to look at the ‘stone facing’ of the Ship Inn, the College and the Church, which he found ‘all stone – modern and uninteresting’, (Webb, 1892). A Bill for this fabric is housed in the archives at Standen, dated April 1894, from Morris and Co., 449 Oxford Street, London, for ‘48 yards of daffodil chintz’. On Webb's drawing for ‘The front face of the sconces’, he instructs that ‘this sketch shows roughly a design for one plate – the other four are made of the same size and general character keeping the hole in the centre boss of the flower exactly in the same position on all five plates – but Mr Pearson can vary the flower and leafage in the other four plates’ (R.I.B.A. PB88 Webb Citation42 59). As such we can see that although Webb had overall control of the design, he allowed the variation of the craftsman to influence the finished copper plates. See for example K Hedges, Useful Information on Electric Lighting, (London: 1882), p.78. And, for that matter, the appearance of people. For example, Lord Ernest Hamilton recalled (Old Lamps and New) that women feared ‘that noone who was not made up for the stage could possibly show herself in the glare of such cruel search lights’. Likewise Mrs Gordon reported that ‘a short time ago...there was a round table seating ten guests, and ten lamps with lemon yellow shades were hung just above their eyes, so that the light was focussed into the eyes and face of everyone sitting at table like a horrid detectives little bull's eye, showing up every wrinkle and live in the face. No one over the age of eighteen should be asked to sit beneath such a light’, (Gordon, 1892, p.60). There is an invoice from the Company detailing the costs of these and other shades at Standen, dated August 9 1894 from Whitefriars Glass Works to JS Beale for in total £20 6 8 1/2 d. Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius where he seeks to link Morris teleogically with Gropius and Bauhaus design, offers a very pertinent discussion of this dichotomy (first published 1936, revised and rewritten, 1960). See, for example, Shirley Bury ‘A Craftsman who used the Machine’, Country Life, CXXXVII no. 3550, March 18, 1965, pp.624-7. ‘The reasons that prompted Benson to run counter to the accepted canons of the Arts and Crafts movement probably lay in his childhood. WN Bruce wrote a brief memoir of the designer for his posthumous publication of Bensons book Drawing and its uses in 1925 where he describes how Benson spent most of his school holidays in the company of a maternal uncle, WA Smith. The uncle was a keen amateur metal worker, who had a workshop elaborately equipped with machinery. Benson, therefore, learned to appreciate the possibilities of the machine, unlike most members of the A and C movement, whose dislike of mechanical production ‘rarely sprang from close personal knowledge of the workings of machinary’. Maureen Dillon is the only other writer to have focussed on Webb as a lighting designer, in the survey she conducted at Standen for the National Trust, and, briefly, in her chapter on electric lighting in Artificial Sunshine

Aesthetics · Architectural engineering · Art · Electrical engineering · Electricity · Visual arts · Architecture and Cultural Influences · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Engineering

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