The Arts & Crafts Houses of C. F. A. Voysey Book of Postcards

A leading figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857–1941) specialized in the design of small country houses for wealthy clients, among them industrialists, a publisher, and the celebrated writer H. G. Wells. With their emphasis on ground-hugging horizontality, hipped roofs, brick walls covered with white-painted roughcast, and enlivening splashes of color, these houses were marked by a graceful simplicity and a refreshing freedom from the imitative styles that had bedeviled so much of England’s nineteenth-century architecture.

Voysey drew his inspiration from vernacular building traditions and practical considerations that led him to reject overblown decoration and clutter, creating homes faithful to his ideal combination of “Repose, Cheerfulness, Simplicity, Breadth, Warmth, Quietness in a storm, Economy of upkeep, Evidence of protection, Harmony with surroundings, Absence of dark passages, even-ness of temperature and making the house a frame to its inmates.” These qualities, which he consistently espoused, are readily evident in some of his most striking works, such as Perrycroft (1894), in Colwall, Hertfordshire; Broadleys (1898) and Moorcrag (1899), which overlook Lake Windermere; and his own house, The Orchard (1899), in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire.