Charles Voysey
Arts and Crafts architect and pattern designer.
Charles Voysey designed country houses with white rendered walls, low roofs and large chimneys, and created wallpapers, textiles and furniture featuring stylised birds and plants. He is regarded as a forerunner of modernism.
Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was born in 1857 in Hessle, Yorkshire. His father was a clergyman who was deposed from the Church of England for denying the doctrine of eternal damnation and founded a church of his own. His father's independence and firm principles influenced the son. Voysey trained as an architect under John Pollard Seddon and then worked for George Devey, who designed country houses.
He set up his own practice in 1882, but in the early years he received few commissions for houses. Instead he earned his living designing wallpapers and textile patterns for various manufacturers. His patterns of stylised birds, trees, hearts and flowers in flat colours became very popular and spread across Europe.
In the 1890s the house commissions came. His works include Perrycroft at Colwall, Broadleys and Moor Crag by Windermere in the Lake District, his own house The Orchard in Chorleywood of 1899, and Spade House for the writer H.G. Wells. The houses are light and low, with white rendered façades, large sloping roofs, sturdy chimneys and long rows of windows. His only factory building, a wallpaper factory in Chiswick in London, was built in 1902.
Voysey liked to design everything down to the smallest detail: furniture, door hinges, keyhole plates, lamps and cutlery. The heart became one of his signature motifs. He wanted his houses to be simple, honest and practical, but he did not see himself as a modernist and distanced himself from the new architecture when it arrived.
After the First World War he received almost no commissions and worked mostly on patterns. In 1936 the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner singled him out as a pioneer of the modern movement, which Voysey himself did not appreciate. He died in 1941. His houses and patterns have had a great influence on the English house and on post-war housing.