Sir Albert
Richardson at home
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Sir Albert Edward Richardson K.C.V.O.,
F.R.I.B.A, F.S.A., (London ,
19 May 1880 – 3 February 1964) was a leading English architect, teacher and
writer about architecture during the first half of the 20th century. He was
Professor of Architecture at University College London, a President of the Royal Academy ,
editor of Architects’ Journal and founder of the Georgian Group.
He wrote several articles for Architectural
Review and the survey of London Houses from 1660 to 1820: a Consideration of
their Architecture and Detail (1911). In the following year he was appointed
architect to the Prince of Wales's Duchy of Cornwall Estate. His massive work,
Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain
and Ireland
(1914) established him as a scholar; in it he reappraised the Greek Revival
architects C.R. Cockerell and Henri Labrouste.
In his own work he was strongly influenced
by nostalgia for the craftsmanship of the late Georgian era and the pared-down
Neoclassicism of Sir John Soane in particular, but he recognised that his
classical ideals needed to be developed to meet the challenges of Modernism. The
result was a synthesis of traditional and modern approaches which was adapted
and applied to industrial and commercial buildings, churches and houses. His
deep knowledge of and sympathy towards Georgian design also helped him in
numerous post-war commissions to restore bomb-damaged Georgian buildings.
Ironically, several of his designs – most notably, Bracken House in the City of
London , the first post-war London building to be listed and protected
from redevelopment – are now regarded as classic milestones of 20th century
design.
He was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for
Architecture in 1947 and was elected President of the Royal Academy
in 1954; he was knighted in 1956.
From 1919 until his death in 1964,
Richardson lived at Avenue House, 20 Church Street, Ampthill, Bedfordshire, an
18th-century townhouse in which he initially refused to install electricity,
believing that his home needed to reflect Georgian standards of living if he
was truly to understand their way of life, though he was later persuaded to
change his mind by his wife, Elizabeth Byers (March 1882 – 1958), whom he had
married in 1904. They had one daughter.
Rejected Riches: Avenue House
GAVIN STAMP
The contents of Avenue House in Ampthill –
the collection assembled by Sir Albert Richardson (1880–1964), architect,
historian, writer, artist, teacher and sometime President of the Royal Academy
– is now being sold by Christie’s in London. Richardson moved into the Georgian brick town
house in the Bedfordshire town in 1919 and over the next 40 years filled it
with products of the Georgian age he loved and understood so well. The result
was not a museum, however; Richardson once described
it as ‘a home, an office, and a university’ – a similar role to that intended
by Sir John Soane for his creation in Lincoln ’s
Inn Fields.
This sale is a sad and wretched business.
Many of Richardson ’s
things do not look particularly impressive now wrenched from their context. The
furniture and decorative objects will undoubtedly appeal to collectors but the
paintings are not of the the highest quality. But that is not the point. What
is now being sold and dispersed constituted a very special and personal tribute
to Georgian England within an appropriate architectural setting. There was
nothing else quite like it. And what is particularly sad is to see the
architectural drawings that are for sale – not just drawings by architects like
Soane but many made for Richardson ’s
own buildings, as well as some intriguing architectural fantasies. These are
things that belong in the RIBA drawings collection.
Even after the Second World War, when he
was perceived by the new modernist establishment as a traditional and
reactionary figure, he showed great resourcefulness in his design for Bracken
House in the City of London .
Barracked by the Anti-Uglies when new, it later became the first post-war
building in England
to be listed.
But what is most depressing is that this
sale need not be happening. Avenue House was lovingly maintained for half a
century after Richardson ’s
death by his grandson, Simon Houfe, who was anxious to secure its future in the
public realm. He offered both house and collection to the National Trust on
advantageous terms. Negotiations dragged on for seven years, only to end with
his offer being rejected.
This seems incomprehensible; especially
when this decision is compared – as many have done – with the National Trust’s
recently announced intention to open, in a nauseatingly populist gesture, the
‘house’ created for the Big Brother reality television show. Of course there
would have been problems in opening Avenue House to the public – as there were
with, say, the small houses in Liverpool bought by the Trust because they were
the childhood homes of two of the Beatles.
Albert Richardson was an intriguing and
important figure in the architectural culture of Britain in the 20th century. He may
be forgotten now – just as Soane’s achievement was despised during the half
century after his death – but the National Trust should have known better.
Albert Richardson
The other
day I finished reading The Professor (White Crescent Press, 1980), Simon
Houfe’s affectionate biography of his grandfather, the architect Sir Albert
Edward Richardson. I’ve been intrigued by Richardson
for a while: he often has a passing mention in memoirs and letters produced
between the wars although, in spite of an architectural career which lasted
from the late 1890s to the early 1960s, his country house output was small. He
enlarged or remodelled one or two minor houses – The Hale, near Wendor (1918)
and Chevithorne Barton in Devon (1930) are
good examples – but the practice he carried on, with C. Lovett Gill until 1939
and from 1945 with his son-in-law, E. A. S. Houfe, focused mainly on commercial
premises, usually designed in a light, elegant neo-Georgian style.
And not
content with promoting the past, Richardson
lived in it. In 1919 he bought Avenue House in Ampthill, built for a
Bedfordshire brewer in 1780 and extended by Henry Holland in 1792-5. Over the
next four decades or so the architect filled Avenue House with art and
oddities: oils by Philip Mercier and Angelica Kauffmann, exquisite George III
furniture in tulipwood and satinwood; a lamp said to belong to the Lady of the
Lamp herself, Florence Nightingale; Clive of India’s door knob and a battered
baluster from Doctor Johnson’s house. He refused to have electricity installed,
and was fond of dressing up in full Georgian costume around the house.
In many
ways Richardson
was a difficult character – bombastic, self-centred, a reactionary conservative
who hated Modernism as much as he loathed modern society. Imagine an architectural
G. K. Chesterton, and you have him. But his contribution to the evolving
preservationist movement of the 1920s and 1930s was profound.
By a
strange coincidence, just as I reached the last page of The Professor, an email
came through from Christie’s announcing the sale of the contents of Avenue
House. The place had remained more or less intact since Richardson ’s death in 1964, and after years
of searching for a way of preserving it for posterity, the family has given up
the struggle.
The Avenue
House sale took place this week. It isn’t a disastrous Mentmore-type dispersal
to be remembered and mourned for decades. It is more of a small sadness. But it
is a sadness, none the less. Something has been lost, and we’re all a little
poorer for it.
The Saloon at Avenue House in 1934
photo courtesy of Country Life
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The Saloon at Avenue House in 1922
photo courtesy of Country Life
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Reggie's Rooms II: The Saloon at Avenue House
I first came across images of Sir Albert
Richardson's enchanting drawing room at Avenue House in Ampthill, Bedfordshire,
in John Cornforth's absorbing book The Inspiration of the Past: Country House
Taste in the Twentieth Century published in 1985 by Viking Penguin in
association with Country Life magazine.
According to Mr. Cornforth's deliciously informative and lavishly
illustrated book, Professor Richardson (as he was also known) was considered to
be "one of the first admirers" in England in the early part of the
twentieth century "...of the style of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, as well as one of the principal promoters of the
continuity of the classical tradition."
This view is amply borne out by the beauty of his decoration of the
Saloon (as it was called) at Avenue House.
While many of the rooms shown in Mr.
Cornforth's book are beautiful, the image of the Saloon took my breath away
when I first saw it and still gives me a frisson of excitement whenever I come
across it to this day. Sir Albert was a
true connoisseur and collected many of the furnishings for the Saloon
specifically for the room, as opposed to bringing them from other houses that
he already owned. So there is a
uniformity of taste and style, rigor perhaps, to the Saloon that is not seen in
rooms where the assembled furnishings are more diverse or "eclectic",
a word much overused in decorating circles in our day.
According to Mr. Cornforth's book, Sir
Albert acquired Avenue House in 1919 and spent the better part of twenty years
furnishing it. And furnishing it he did,
exquisitely, with supreme taste and restraint--the true hallmarks of
elegance. While the photographed
interior is lovely to look at (the quality of Country Life's
mid-twentieth-century photography is mesmerizing), the black-and-white image
does not convey the room's color scheme, which, according to Country Life, was
as follows: "A greenish grey carpet covers the floor, and grey, too is the
colour of the walls, in contrast to which is the purple taffeta, with old-gold
filigree used for the window hangings, and the yellow chenille of old French
pattern used for some of the chair coverings..." How I would love to see color images of this
room.
So what is it about the Saloon at Avenue
House that so vividly speaks to me?
It is finely proportioned, with high
ceilings, handsome plasterwork, and large windows;
In it hangs a lovely, appropriately scaled
chandelier;
The furnishings are from a narrow band of
time, drawn from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so they
are not slavishly in only one style or period; they include a mix of Regency
and earlier furnishings;
There is plenty of airspace and breathing
room. Sir Albert had the luxury of space
to furnish the Saloon sparely and appropriately for a drawing room devoted to
entertaining and congenial pursuits;
The furnishings and architecture are
arranged symmetrically and with balance;
The furniture is attennuated and leggy,
which gives the room a light appearance--all "en pointe;"
The seating is easily movable, to provide
for intimate groupings and diverse purposes, the signature of a successful
drawing room. There are no stationary
to-the-floor upholstered club chairs or Lawson sofas to lower the room's sight
lines or confine the occupants to one place.
This is appealling to me because we have also furnished our (much
smaller and far less grand) drawing room at Darlington House in a similar
manner, with no fully upholstered seating.
While I don't object to entirely upholstered chairs and sofas, I prefer
them in more intimate rooms devoted to cozier pursuits;
Most of the furniture is painted, rather
than stained and varnished. Painted furniture
is most pleasing in drawing rooms, I believe, as it is pretty and less
serious-looking than brown wood furniture, which is more appropriate in dining
rooms and libraries. Much of the seating
in our drawing room at Darlington is also
painted, but--unlike the Saloon at Avenue House--ours is mostly Louis XVI, with
only a smattering of Sir Albert's English Regency;
There are large, plate-glass mirrors over
the fireplace and between the windows. I
have a weakness for mirrors in rooms, and large ones in particular when the
room's proportions allow for them.
Mirrors, when used such as Sir Albert does, lend a light and fresh
appearance to the rooms in which they hang;
The floor is covered with a large,
single-color, velvet carpet, providing a unifying and visually serene base for
the furniture. I think that there is a
tendency today to believe carpets should have some pattern in them, to create
"visual interest" (another much over-used expression) in rooms and to
avoid the dreaded broadloom "wall-to-wall" carpet look of the 1960s
and 70s. It is noteworthy that our
forebears had other views, as pieced carpets such as Sir Albert's were quite
expensive and luxurious in their day, bearing little resemblance, when examined
closely, to the more modern and degraded versions for sale in today's big-box
retailers;
The curtains are plain and unfussified,
with neither swags nor jabots. My only
complaint with them is that I wish the valances had been placed a foot higher
on the wall, above the windows, rather than hanging down over them. As in Canon Valpy's drawing room, my first
and previous "Reggie's Rooms" subject, Sir Albert's curtains lack any
extraneous upholsterer's tricks, relying on the beauty of their materials
rather than bows or gimgracks.
But it was nearly 10 years later when I
first came across this earlier photograph of the same room that I truly came to
appreciate what Sir Albert had wrought at Avenue House. And how fortunate we are that Country Life
chronicled the Saloon's transformation from an under-furnished, almost raw, and
obviously only-recently-moved-into space into the beautiful swan that it became
over the twelve years of Sir Albert's careful attention. It is in examining, comparing, and studying
these two photographs that we come to fully appreciate Sir Albert's
academically grounded genius. (It also
appears that the curtains faded considerably in the period between when these
photographs were taken.)
Almost all of the rooms we see today in
books and magazines (and now on the blogs) are presented as fully realized and
"done," giving no indication of the thought, effort, and
consideration that went into creating them.
Seeing a room's transformation over time, as we do here with the
Saloon, is a rarity and a treat, and
something of great interest to those of us who enjoy the pleasures (and dare I
say "process") of interior decoration. What else would explain the enduring
popularity of the "Before and After"--or, as Boy and I call them, the
"During and Done"--issues of the often odious Architectural Digest
magazine?
I believe that the Saloon at Avenue House
is a room that merits careful study and has much to teach us today regarding
placement, proportion, symmetry, and purpose.
It is one of my most-admired interiors and has been one of the
inspirations for the furnishing of our more modest drawing room at Darlington
House.
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