Well, I've been meaning to write a post about this book for a long time, and by 'a long time' I mean 5 years....since when on our holiday in Norfolk I found 'The House Book' in the secondhand bookshop run by the Bure Valley Railway at their station in Wroxham. It was a book I had been looking for for some time. It is hefty tome, choc full of photographs of then contemporary interiors. A surfeit of images and ideas. And that is one of this book's fascinations; it makes for an excellent record of British middle class taste in interior design in the late Sixties and early seventies. (London centred at that.) And it is heady stuff, bold and intense. Confident. A startling contrast too to the prevailing sense of failure and dissolution that began to swamp Britain at the time. I find it a perennial inspiration, and have given copies of it as gifts to those I know who are setting up home.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
This encyclopaedic, heavyweight tome was published by Mitchell Beazley in 1974, and it bears the imprimatur of Terence Conran, though how much of the text is actually by him is open to question - there is a long list of contributors at the beginning. Perhaps it is best seen as a collaborative effort of a team of writers and designers in the Conran orbit - the design of the book, for instance, was not the work of the publishers but 'in-house' at Conran Associates. Stafford Cliff, also the Art Director of the Habitat catalogue in the 1970s, was the designer. Whatever the truth, 'The House Book' was one of the ways that Conran became known as was one of the major arbiters, and shapers, of Post-War Middle Class taste in Britain. And I think it was a very bourgeois project for all the talk of the democratisation. Conran is rather like the British cookery writer Delia Smith in that they are both interpreters, and indeed re-packagers, of high style to the new (and therefore uncertain) Middle Classes. (What this meant in effect was they took the ideas of, say, the British cookery writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) and made them accessible.) Both Conran and Smith therefore stand in the tradition of Mrs Beeton the famous nineteenth century cookery writer, that exhaustive guide for the newly bourgeois.
Anyway what Conran did in the terms of retail, i.e. Habitat which he founded in 1964, was all very aspirational. All those room sets in 1970s Habitat catalogues craftily contained the element of unattainability - yes, of course one could easily buy the furniture etc, but the rooms invariably contained decorative elements that were not so easily affordable or available. Things, one might argue, that were only available to the metropolitan initiate. It was all very clever - simultaneously to satisfy and feed the desire. To leave the consumer oh so hungry - eternally hungry, eternally insecure - for more. Consumerism as way of achieving group identity.
Well, The House Book is, thankfully, rather less hard sell than that. One could call it neutral in that respect, though one suspects plenty of Conran design projects on display. It is also deeply practical, as well as frankly beautiful. (I always feel that one of the major influences on Conran is that French art of living - L'Art de Vivre, that is such a joy and fascination in French literature.) There are sections on all sorts of things you need to know to run a house well, but perhaps the most telling section is at the beginning of the book when the uncertain amongst us are taken gently by the hand and given six design templates to follow: 'Farmhouse', 'Townhouse',' Country House', 'Mediterranean', 'International' and 'Eclectic'. Six consumer choices, six items from the dressing up box. Anyway the book is full of images of work by any number of favourites of this blog: Geoffrey Bennison, David Hicks, Mary Gilliatt, David Hockney and his assistant Mo McDermot, and Alvilde Lees Milne. Anyway enough said - here are twelve images for your delectation and delight. More to follow.
