Customer Reviews

Arts and Crafts Master: The Houses and Gardens of M.H. Baillie Scott (Arts & Crafts Master)

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Spacious design, thoughtful planning and quality from the smallest to the largest decorative elements figure in the long and productive career of the architect featured in "Arts and Crafts Master: The Houses and Gardens of M.H. Baillie Scott (Arts & Crafts Master)."

The book examines and explains 30 homes designed by the English architect, a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, which adhered to a belief in simple forms and a commitment to quality craftsmanship, and influenced architecture, interior decorating and decorative arts. Baillie Scott, in particular, integrated landscaping concerns into the home's design, with themes and the same care applied both indoors and out.

All but one of the structures are in Britain or Europe, with the exception being The Close in Short Hills, N.J., designed by Baillie Scott but built under the direction of the famed New York firm, McKim, Mead & White, completed in 1913. This home features a chapel off a courtyard, window seats in the main house, a sleeping porch and plenty of open spaces, but above all, half timber design. Among them are the stone Castletown police station in Castletown, Isle of Man, completed in 1902; the White Lodge in Wantage, Oxfordshire, 1899; the Havisham House in Rough Common, Canterbury, Kent, 1912, and Dove's Nest, in Uckfield, East Sussex, 1904.

The look of all the homes is inviting, with the photos seeming to encourage readers to step into the rooms or at least touch the walls and fine woodwork or stone through the pictures. Clever camera angles show sunlight streaming across rooftops or brightening the stone paths to gardens and open spaces. The effect of the architect's work is comfort surrounded by quality, not a cold estate designed to make the architect look good.

Architecture students, interior design aficionados and others will enjoy the beauty of these pages and the history it reveals about design principles of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

If you are a fan of English Arts and Crafts architecture this book is a must own because of the beautiful contemporary color photographs of Baillie Scott's houses. The text, sadly, adds nothing to the critical assesment of Baillie Scott's work or to his biography. For this Kornwolf's book is still the definative work. It, however, is poorly illustrated with small balck and white photos, and if you want to "see" how good Baillie Scott was, buy this beautiful coffee table book from Rizzoli.
Stuart Cohen, FAIA, SAH

There is an enormous homeliness about arts and crafts architecture and one of the key points is the feeling of shelter that one gets from a visible roof which includes living quarters within its volume, not merely underneath it. The 40 houses designed by Baillie Scott and reviewed here exemplify how the architect repeatedly meets this primal need. As you would expect in a book published in 2010 the colour pictures are superb and there is no reliance on old b&w photographs. Many more houses are shown than in the Academy Editions monograph " Baillie Scott - The Artistic House" by Diane Haigh but these two publications read together clearly reveal to the reader Baillie Scott's marvellous talent.
I would have appreciated the addition of more plans on a slightly larger scale than those presented.