Exploring family life at Standen House and Garden - new book

She has now written the book that she quickly saw was missing – Standen: Philip Webb, Morris & Co and the Creation of an Arts and Crafts Home, by Anne Stutchbury with Tessa Wild, Stephen Ponder and Alice M Strickland, published by Yale University Press in association with the National Trust at £35 (272 pages, 296 colour + b/w illustrations, YaleBooks 47 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP; www.yalebooks.co.uk).

“I wanted to share the knowledge that I gained through my PhD research,” Anne explains. “There was no whole book devoted to Standen, with the house and the family equally important. I think maybe it had not been perceived to have had the significance especially as it is tucked away in a quiet place, or maybe if you were an Arts and Crafts enthusiast you knew about it already. But what had been written about Standen had been more from an architectural perspective. And Standen was important architecturally but there was a whole back story of the family experience that nobody knew about.

“But the fascinating thing about Standen is that there is a lot of archives that either came with the house or were later returned to the house by the family. And we found some really valuable material about how the Beale family decorated the house in the early days and the things that they bought to decorate interiors with on their trips abroad. There was an exhaustive amount of material including letters from the First World War period and also lots of photographs.”

Adding to the interest is the fact that until the house was given to the National Trust in 1972 there had only ever been one family living there.

It all began in 1891 when James Beale, a wealthy, middle-class Unitarian solicitor from Birmingham, commissioned architect Philip Webb to design a holiday home in the Sussex countryside. The Beale family remained sole owners of the property until Helen Beale, James and Margaret Beale’s last surviving child, bequeathed the estate to the National Trust.

Although Standen is recognised by architectural historians as a fine and complete example of Philip Webb’s Arts and Crafts architecture of the period and is widely celebrated for its Morris & Co wallpapers and furnishings, as Anne says, little has been written about how the family experienced the house, garden and estate and the extent to which this shaped Standen’s later life under the National Trust.

The book fills the void, focusing on the Beales’ lived experience and how they collaborated with Philip Webb in the creation of Standen. Historic photographs and material from the family and estate archives, relating to both the property and its magnificent collection, reveal the extent to which the Beales’ appreciation for the Arts and Crafts Movement influenced the creation of Standen’s decorative interior, its gardens and the wider estate, from 1890 to the present day.

“When I was first studying at Sussex, where I went as a mature student, I decided that I really liked the late 19th century,” Anne says, “and I wanted to understand more about it so I decided to volunteer to be a room guide at Standen. That was about 2006-2007. And the thing that struck me was how visitors came around, just normal everyday people rather than specialist historians, and they were commenting on how homely a place it was. It was a place that everybody found that they could relate to yet there was nothing really about the people that had lived there. I decided I wanted to write something about the family because until then it seemed that very little was known about them.”

And this despite the large number of descendants. There was a big family reunion at Standen in 2006, and Anne was involved in a second one in 2016 which was attended by nearly 200 family descendants.

“We are pushing for another reunion next year.”

Contributors: Anne Stutchbury is an independent art historian, researcher and writer specialising in the lived experience and social and cultural perspectives of the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements. Tessa Wild is an architectural historian and curator, and author of William Morris and his Palace of Art (Philip Wilson, 2018). Stephen Ponder is a retired National Trust curator and writer specialising in Victorian and Edwardian architecture. Alice M Strickland is a National Trust curator in London and the south-east and an independent writer.