THE HOUSE AND ITS EQUIPMENT. 



THE CASE FOR MODERN FURNITURE. 



The Impulses that Re-created Furniture Design Influence and Work of William Morns The Arts and 

 Ci-Lif/s Societv- The Work of Mr Ernest (Unison, Professor Le/hnbv, Mr. Ambrose Hen! and Others - 



Reproductions of &quot;Antiques&quot; versus Modern Design. 



WE are all users ot furniture, many ul us owners &amp;lt;&amp;gt;! some, and to most there comes the 

 time when fancy lightly turns to thoughts of furnishing. At this springtime even the 

 man of commerce is wont to wish that he could trace beauty to its source ; he feels 

 vaguely that his home should be pretty, but it must be cheap. He would not think of buying 

 a cheap motor-car, but for some inscrutable reason has no objection to cheap chairs. 

 The latter half of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly the cheafi age, and certainly nasty, so far as 

 furniture was concerned. It is difficult to trace how this all came about ; but until recently it was general. 



Xow it is only by a few degrees less so, and we find 

 houses furnished throughout with chairs, carpets and 

 curtains which indignant housewives of three genera 

 tions back would have thrown away as rubbish. Is 

 the modern man less virtuous or more foolish than his 

 forbears ? Does he really think a Chippendale chair 

 (with apologies to the great cabinet-maker) can be 

 made and sold for a pound? It is want of thought, 

 not heart ; our man of commerce, if he will but think, 

 must realise that his chairs are but poor sweated imita 

 tions, and as such should find no place in his home. 

 Better things are expected of him, no less than that 

 he should seek lor furniture produced in other ways 

 perhaps as Morris used to hope, by &quot; an art made bv 

 the peopie, and for the people, as a happiness to the 

 maker and user.&quot; 



To write of Morris brings to memory the good 

 story told about him when taken as a youth to the 

 Great Exhibition of 1851. He sat down on a seat 

 near the entrance and refused to go any further, 

 declaring that it was all &quot; wonderfully ugly.&quot; If we 

 judge by illustrations that remain of some of the 

 exhibits, it was a just criticism. Nothing was too silly 

 or too ugly to be included, and this is true especially 

 of the furniture. Yet less than a century before, from 

 Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite had come the 

 wonderful furniture that made their names famous. 

 The following gem, from an illustrated encyclopaedia, 

 describes an oak niche at the exhibition : &quot; The great 

 peculiarity of this niche consists in its being designed 

 after the old principle, to suit the material in which 

 it has been executed.&quot; Open confession is good for 

 the soul, and here we get to the kernel of the whole 

 matter the commercialist of 1851 had no principles or 

 scruples ; his one idea was to set his machine going, 

 and if it woidd not make a thing in wood, then it was 

 stamped out in papier-mache. 



The wave of commercialism which flowed over the country as a result of the exhibition left men 

 no time or inclination to carry on the traditions of the Arts and Crafts ; rather was it the fashion to depart 

 violently from them. But if the exhibition served no other useful purpose, it set Morris to work to 

 institute sounder principles. Born in 1834, he was articled to Street, the architect, in 1856, and though 

 he speedily tired of the routine of the office, one likes to remember these tee-square days ; architecture, 

 as the mother of the Arts, never fostered a healthier babe. He was married in 1859, and the difficulty 



OAK CHEST 



DRAWERS. 



