The Making of Home

by Judith Flanders

  By the nineteenth century, many of the comfortably-off in countries that used stoves, particularly Germany and the USA, lived in houses with extremely efficient heating systems, and the inhabitants often commented on those, particularly in Britain, who remained emotionally attached to fireplaces, which used more fuel while producing markedly less heat. Hermann Muthesius, the architect-trained son of a small building contractor from Thuringia, served as a diplomatic attaché in London from 1896 to 1904, and his appalled fascination with English domestic arrangements is telling.* He mentions the poor quality of the weather-proofing of housing: the thin walls, the lack of insulating cellars, double-glazing and entrance porches, the poor-fitting windows and doors, all of which he attributed to the mildness of the climate. Then he moves on to fireplaces. He acknowledges that, given the damp climate, the ventilating element of fireplaces, which suck up air voraciously, is useful, although he clearly finds bizarre the phlegmatic English acceptance of the resulting draughts. ‘The many advantages the fireplace is deemed to possess (not least its aesthetic advantages, some of which, it must be admitted, exist only in the imagination) so completely convince an Englishman of its superiority to all other forms of heating’, he notes, that the superior efficiency, and value, of stoves is passed over. By the 1870s, hot-water central heating was widely used in greenhouses, and in some public buildings that were not suitable for fires, such as church halls and civic spaces, but the cheapness and easy availability of coal meant that these other forms of heating were rarely if ever considered for domestic purposes. Fires remained totemic for the British: in World War I a popular patriotic song urged the populace to ‘Keep the home fires burning’, and at the start of World War II, coal fires still heated the houses of three-quarters of the population.

  The harsh climate across swathes of North America made it necessary for residents to be far more pragmatic when it came to heating, and as the population was drawn from many northern European countries, knowledge of other technologies was readily available. From the 1840s, cast-iron stoves were the standard heating method, initially in the form of the popular Franklin fireplace, which had metal sides and was open at the front, later with the closed stoves of Europe gaining popularity. An amateur watercolour shows the dining room of a doctor’s house in Rhode Island in 1815 with its Franklin stove and, beside it, a figure in heavy clothes (see plate section, no. 25). Whether this was intended to suggest the man has come in from outside (a pair of boots sits beside him), or whether the room is, despite the stove, still bitterly cold, is impossible to say.

  Central heating began to appear in the USA in the 1890s, but until the 1920s, like so many domestic improvements, initially it remained the preserve of the wealthy, or at least those of the middle classes who lived in new houses. Installing it involved major construction work. A basement had to be dug to house the furnace, and pipes and ducts run behind walls and under floors. Just as the spread of chimneys had reoriented the design of buildings, allowing not only changes to house layouts, but also to the behaviour of the houses’ inhabitants, so too the adoption of central heating changed more than just the temperature, altering both room use and permitting new ideas of privacy to flourish. With fireplaces and stoves, the cost and labour of heating ensured that as many members of the household as possible would naturally gather in the room where a fire burnt, irrespective of the number of activities being undertaken. With central heating, there was only a small difference in fuel consumption when additional rooms were heated, and there was no increase at all in labour. There was therefore little reason not to heat several, or all, of the rooms, irrespective of which were occupied at any given moment. There was no longer an economic or labour-saving reason for many people to gather in a single room, and so the members of the family, and their activities, began to spread across the different rooms of the house.

  Where the USA did follow many other countries, both house and home, was in sharing an emotional response to the hearth, and in associating the fireplace with the idea of home, and family life, as a whole. In the 1860s, an American outlined to his fiancée his ‘visions of [our] future years fraught with happiness’, years ‘when we should sit together by ourselves in “our home” on the winter evenings by our bright fireside’. In Britain, this emotional reading of a physical architectural element was so reflexive that it was generally noticed only by foreigners. At the end of the nineteenth century, Muthesius wrote that ‘All ideas of domestic comfort, of family happiness, of inward personal life, of spiritual wellbeing, centre around the fireplace.’ By this date, if anything, that focus had now increased. Earlier, at mid-century, Gothic Revival architects took their inspiration from churches and public buildings, not natural locations for fireplaces, or domestic associations. Nevertheless, their domestic designs frequently highlighted a symbolic over a pragmatic function for the hearth. The houses designed by Augustus Pugin often incorporated the chimney-breast into the exterior walls, in a style reminiscent of the Middle Ages. This was deeply fuel-inefficient, causing far more heat to escape than even traditional fireplace construction did. But the style announced to the world at large the presence of the fireplace, and the value of the symbolism apparently weighed more strongly than the value of the heat.

  Later, the architects of the Arts and Crafts movement were equally focused on the fireplace as a locus of home emotions. For interiors, they revived the inglenook, a feature last seen in the days when fireplaces had first moved to the walls from the centre of the hall. Then benches had been placed under the great overhanging hoods that loomed over the hearth area, forming a seating area in the warmth. When the fireplaces were set into the walls themselves, the hanging hoods had given way to the mantelpiece and the inglenooks vanished. Now, at the end of the nineteenth century, this reactionary architectural style produced recessed seating areas around the fire once more, creating artificial inglenooks and re-centring household life on the fireplace. On the exterior of their buildings, Arts and Crafts architects such as Edward Lutyens also frequently designed chimneys that were much taller than was necessary for smoke dispersal, ensuring that these symbols of home were visible from afar.

  Others favoured roofs that swept down low, with overhanging eaves, to create a sense of safety and enclosure, the emotional resonance of home in physical form (see plate section, no. 19). And yet, powerful as these symbols were, these same architects frequently displayed a lack of engagement with the practicalities of home. Charles Voysey’s houses were notorious for their poor heating and plumbing, for kitchens that were both unattractive and inconvenient, and frequently decades behind in their provision of basic facilities. The style’s emotional impact appears to have been bought at the cost of physical comfort: the appearance of homeliness taking precedence over the reality of home-making.

  The same emotional impulse drew these architects to return to old-fashioned casement windows fitted with small, leaded panes of glass, overturning three centuries of improved glazing technology. By this stage, of course, windows were regarded as par for the course; in earlier centuries, they had been a concern. Windows might let in thieves, or just the dangerous night air. Witches might also enter: doors, chimneys and windows were all vulnerable points, and witch bottles were buried under doors or hearths, and horseshoes hung over windows to protect them. (One London house was found to have had its window protected thus as late as 1790.) On a more practical level, too many windows also caused a central hearth to smoke uncontrollably. Northern climates had to balance the benefits of additional light against the consequent loss of heat; southern ones against the influx of additional heat. The Anglo-Saxon words for window – eye-hole, wind-door, eye-door – suggest tiny size, and that they were for ventilation, or at most for peering through the way peepholes are used in apartment doors today. As ‘wind-door’ suggests, windows were originally also open to the elements, with no shutters. Even in the Middle Ages, a window was primarily for ventilation, not light: the word referred to any opening that was not a door. For
much of the subsequent centuries, most housing was built to an unspoken rule, that each wall had at most one opening, be it a chimney, a door or a window.

  The first known reference to glazing in England dates from 675, when French glass, and the French glaziers who knew how to fit it, were imported to install church windows at Jarrow, in Northumberland. (The monastery was also the first stone ecclesiastical building in the British Isles.) But this was singular. Glass began to be used more routinely in ecclesiastical buildings only from the twelfth century; it was the middle of the thirteenth before secular buildings followed suit, and then glass was confined entirely to the houses of the wealthy. The windows of the less well-off, depending on their location, were covered with shutters, or with wooden latticework; or with waxed or oiled paper or linen, or fabric rendered opaque by soaking it in turpentine. In the British Isles the church continued to be at the forefront of glazing innovations: in the thirteenth century Lincoln Cathedral was the first to use wooden frames to hold the glass, and to set its shutters on hinges – previously the boards had been nailed in place. In the fourteenth century, in the halls of the aristocracy, the two purposes of windows, light and ventilation, were commonly treated separately. Generally, the top section was glazed, for light, and did not open, while an unglazed lower section was covered with shutters, for ventilation. Some were mixed, the fixed glazed panes interspersed with small panels of lead, known as ventilation quarrels, that were designed to open, letting air in and smoke out. But a division between functions remained standard in the Low Countries in the fifteenth century and then spread across northwestern Europe, with modifications: fixed glazing in the upper section of the window, sometimes an unglazed, shuttered mid-section, and a lower section with a wooden lattice, or wooden shutters, or both (see plate section, nos. 10 and 11).

  Early glass was the most fragile of materials: a pane might shatter in strong winds or heavy rain. When wealthy owners travelled between their houses, therefore, these delicate, and valuable, panes were routinely removed from their frames and carefully wrapped and stored, or they were packed in their baggage along with other valuables such as tapestries, jewels and plate. Because of this, until the early years of the sixteenth century, the glass panes and the windows they were fitted into were considered to be separate items: legally the frames were an intrinsic part of the building, while the glass those frames held belonged to the owner of the house, to be sold or bequeathed like any other personal possession. Then, as the cost of glass dropped dramatically over the course of the century, the builders of Elizabethan and Jacobean great houses embraced glass as a building material, using it in a way previously unknown, and to an extent that went far beyond any need for light. It became, for the first time, an object of conspicuous consumption. Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire (1590–97) was the most extreme example, so extreme that there was even a little ditty about it: ‘Hardwick Hall, More glass than wall.’ The sheer acreage of glass there created numerous problems, from intolerable glare indoors, to awkward arrangements of furniture, owing to the paucity of solid walls. Hardwick was built by the Countess of Shrewsbury, one of the great aristocrats, and the richest woman, of the day, but the mercantile rich also participated in the fashion for what might be described as seventeenth-century curtain-walling. By the end of the century, the rapid acceptance of what had previously been a rarity had produced a new legal standard: ‘without glass’, ruled the courts, ‘it is no perfect house’. Glass was henceforth an integral, and integrated, part of the window.

  Integral, but still a luxury rather than a necessity, even for the comfortably-off. Many who could now afford glass still saw no particular reason to glaze their windows. In Oxfordshire in the sixteenth century, less than 4 per cent of the inventories of the poor and the averagely circumstanced mention any glass windows at all; even among the better-off, it was less than one in ten. As the seventeenth century began, prosperous farmhouses in the Midlands often had glazed windows only in the hall, or just one glazed window per room. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that three glazed windows per room became typical.

  In the American colonies, glass, and even windows, long remained the rarity they had been in Europe in earlier centuries. In the early years of colonial settlement, windows were primarily seen as creating vulnerabilities. Physically, windows would open up houses to potential attacks from indigenous peoples; emotionally, there was a sense that they opened the colonists up to the wildness of the new world more generally. Then there was the climate, in most places more extreme than the home climates of the early immigrants. Whether for heat-conservation in the north, or protection from the sun in the south, shutters did a better job than glass. And for all in those early days, the technology, even at the most basic level, had to be imported. In the middle of the seventeenth century, advice to would-be settlers continued to tell them to ‘bring paper and linseed oil for your windows’. Flowerdew Hundred, a Virginia plantation that existed from at least 1619, had one of the earliest stone foundations in English America. One of the later houses on this site had at least some glazed windows, for archaeological finds there have included English lead window-bars inscribed 1693 (although there is no telling when they were shipped to the colonies).

  It is notable that in colonial America, as had earlier been the case in England, window-glass, and the frames, were not part of the building, but pieces of furniture, along with the shutters, or the household furnishings, or even ‘the bedstead matt’. The older legal distinction mirrored the older emotional response to windows, and to many in the new world they were neither necessary nor desirable. In 1637, one householder instructed his builder: ‘For windowes, let them not be over large in any roome, & few as conceivably may be.’ And as late as 1751, many considered them a fashionable addition, a luxurious extra. A New England minister’s new house had thirteen windows, which caused ‘very Sharp’ comments to be made about ‘the pride of Ministers’, he reported dolefully. He hastily professed himself ‘griev’d that the windows were so large and I have often said it that I wish’d they were less’.

  Into the nineteenth century, half of the houses in the USA had either no glazed windows at all, or just one, and that one usually no more than the size of a single small pane. Instead many continued to use slatted shutters, which were ‘universal’ by the nineteenth century, and had the benefit of letting in fresh breezes while excluding dust and some insects, as well as providing shade in the warmer areas of the country. In 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted described, with all the astonishment of a sophisticated urban northerner, a house owned by a southern planter. The landowner was more than solvent, owning between twenty and thirty slaves, and yet, wrote Olmsted, amazed, his house was nothing but a ‘small square log cabin’ with ‘no window, nor was there a pane of glass’ anywhere on the property.

  Olmsted was representative of many prosperous city dwellers, who were the beneficiaries of the revolution in window design that, over the previous two centuries, had transformed the buildings of much of northwestern Europe. The first development was at Versailles, halfway through its transformation under Louis XIV, and already known across Europe for its grandeur. In 1673, when the innovative Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin visited the court, the palace’s great series of grands appartements were complete. Tessin, however, gave his first consideration not to the interiors, to the overwhelming grandeur of the designs, but to a technical novelty: casement windows set in pairs, and now extended to reach from floor level nearly to the ceiling, which in English are still designated ‘French’ windows. These clearly fascinated him, and he detailed their workings – how they opened and closed, how the frames were built, their size and decoration. He was not alone. The windows were widely admired, and by the 1690s several aristocrats had arranged for these novelties to be featured in their new Parisian mansions. But incorporating the style into older buildings required major structural work to the walls, and was not something to be undertaken lightly. French windows, instead of bringing lig
ht to the many, remained a luxury of the wealthiest few.

  It was, instead, the English and the Dutch who most thoroughly domesticated light, in the seventeenth century creating a new style that was quickly emulated across the home countries, literally enlightening the homes of millions. The sash window consists of two identical frames, or sashes, set one above the other, with a double tier (or more) of glass panes in each. Instead of opening outward on a hinge, as casement windows do, one frame slides up or down over the second one. Simple sliding windows that could be propped open with wooden blocks, struts or pins had been in use in France by the end of the sixteenth century, usually in corridors and service areas where limited space restricted the use of casements. The revolutionary feature of the English sash window was not the sliding element, but the weight-and-pulley mechanism inside the frame. The weights counterbalanced the two frames as each was raised or lowered, allowing the window to remain open in any position. Upper sashes could, for example, be left open only a few inches at the very top, above the level of the three-quarter shutters then common, ventilating a room at night even as the shutters kept the house secure. Furthermore, the new wooden frames could be fitted more tightly than a casement’s metal frame, keeping out both damp and draughts far more efficiently. (It is notable that sash windows were most frequently first installed in bedrooms and chambers, rooms where draughts were easily felt.)