Arts and craft home style
What Is an Arts and Crafts Home?
By
Ashley Knierim
Ashley Knierim
Ashley Knierim is a home decor expert and product reviewer of home products for The Spruce. Her design education began at a young age. She has over 10 years of writing and editing experience, formerly holding editorial positions at Time and AOL.
Learn more about The Spruce's Editorial Process
Updated on 02/02/22
Fact checked by
Sarah Scott
Fact checked by Sarah Scott
Sarah Scott is a fact-checker and researcher who has worked in the custom home building industry in sales, marketing, and design.
Learn more about The Spruce's Editorial Process
Arts and Crafts-style homes may be one of the most complex styles of architecture. While there are many key features of an Arts and Crafts home, the style draws similarities from several other architectural aesthetics, making it a little more difficult to pick it out. In older homes. you'll find that Arts and Crafts isn't exactly a single style, but rather a specific approach to many different types of architecture.
The History of Arts and Crafts Homes
As a reaction to the manufactured and ornate styles of the Victorian age, Arts and Crafts-style homes embraced handcrafted design and approachable materials. The style originated in England in the mid-19th century and came to America around the beginning of the 20th century. The term "Arts and Crafts" refers to a broader social movement that encompasses not just architecture, but also interior design, textiles, fine art, and more.
The design movement began as a revolt against the opulence of the Industrial Revolution, where design could be needlessly overdone. Arts and Crafts instead focused on the opposite–instead of mass-produced and uninspired, the movement was all about being handcrafted and personal. The idea was that if quality could replace quantity, good design and good taste would prevail.
The Arts and Crafts movement was directly tied to the rise of Craftsman and Bungalow-style homes, architecture that played off of the same mentality of simple but thoughtful structures. Bungalows were intended to give working-class families the ability to own a well-designed home that was easy to maintain and manage.
bungalowsandcottages / Instagram
What Defines an Arts and Crafts Home?
An Arts and Crafts-style home can be symmetrical or asymmetrical in its facade and is typically low to the ground. They are designed to use space efficiently and economically, and by nature require little upkeep if planned well. They often feature multiple chimneys and a very prominent "sheltering roof." Windows are plentiful, but often made up of small panes.
There are many types of architecture within the Arts and Crafts style, including Craftsman and Bungalows.
Key Elements
When looking at an Arts and Crafts home, you will find a few key elements that transcend across styles.
Roof: The roof of an Arts and Crafts home is typically low pitched, with wide, unenclosed eave overhangs.
Exposed beams: The rafters on the roof and the beams inside the home are often exposed in an Arts and Crafts home.
Built-ins: One key element of this design style is the rise of built-in furniture. The movement brought a wave of built-in bookshelves, window seats, and cabinets that felt custom to the house and perfectly suited to the design.
Windows: The home's windows are typically made up of smaller panes and set in multiple assemblies.
Fireplace: An Arts and Crafts home often had a very large fireplace that centered the open living space and acted as a focal point for the room.
Prominent Porches: It's rare to find an Arts and Crafts-style home without an obvious porch equipped with prominent columns. The porch is typically limited to the front door area, but sometimes will wrap around the house.
Floor Plan: The homes of the Arts and Crafts movement featured wide-open floor plans, a stark contrast to the boxy, segmented rooms of the Victorian-style homes that came before.
Common Materials
Again, in an effort to reject the design periods that came before, Arts and Crafts homes were made from natural elements. The use of local materials was encouraged, and you will often see the use of real stone, brick, and wood throughout the home.
You'll also find fine handiwork features throughout the home, such as hammered metalwork and the use of authentic copper and bronze. Designers and craftsmen took pride in their work, and so an Arts and Crafts home will often feel well-made and thoughtful.
Interesting Facts
The Arts and Crafts-style home is one that inspired and directly led to many of the houses you'll spot across America today. Because the design is that of handcrafted simplicity, these homes rarely go out of style, even as design trends change throughout the years.
Though Arts and Crafts design became less popular after World War I, the ideals behind the movement (well-made, handcrafted design) remained important throughout history. You'll still find examples of Arts and Crafts-style homes and the cozy Bungalow or the Craftsman home.
What Is an Arts and Crafts Style House?
Arts and Crafts doesn’t refer to one particular house style, but to an entire architectural movement that initially emerged in Great Britain during the second half of the 19th century. This movement was a direct response to the Industrial Revolution which radically transformed, with architects and artists pushing back against cold “futuristic” designs, and rejecting inferior mass-produced goods and materials in favor of traditional artisan-crafted ones.
Unlike typical British Victorian architecture, which focused on extravagant architecture and ornate details, the Arts and Crafts movement celebrated the beauty of the natural world, and was meant to harken back to a preindustrial world of simplicity.
This creative ethos was applied to many creative pursuits besides architecture, including landscape design, furniture, and interior styling,
Here's what you should know about how this style came to be, its key characteristics, and what to expect in Arts and Crafts-influenced homes.
The earliest homes of the Arts and Crafts movement were designed to evoke centuries-old dwellings, using building materials with roots in the natural world: Wood, stucco, stone, and rustic brick are the most common materials used for siding.
Inside, the layout of Arts and Crafts homes are designed for function above all else: featuring plenty of open space, and plenty of large windows to allow for sunlight. Arts and Crafts houses don’t limit the use of exposed natural elements to the exterior; inside, you’ll find accents of handcrafted stone or wood, and use built-in architectural features like shelves, seating, and cabinetry to bring the outdoors inside.
On the first floor, an Arts and Crafts-style home will have an open living room that connects to a dining or multi-use space, with a small kitchen toward the rear of the house.
In contrast to the well-defined spaces and boxy rooms of Victorian homes, Arts and Crafts homes utilized open floor plans emphasizing practical design that not only allows their owners to easily move about, but also to keep it well-lit and climate-controlled. The main living area will feature a fireplace, and if the home has a second story, there will likely be another fireplace in the largest bedroom. Ceilings were kept low to help conserve heat, which adds to the snug, cozy feel of these houses.
Here are the common features of Arts and Crafts-style homes.
Exterior:
Interior:
Though the Arts and Crafts Movement began in mid-19th century Britain, its embrace of the handcrafted aesthetics of a pre-industrial world didn’t make its way to the United States until the turn of the 20th century, thanks to a magazine called The Craftsman. In that era, many houses across the country were built using residential blueprints found in magazines; The Craftsman’s simple plans were created by famed Arts and Crafts furniture designer Gustav Stickley, whose simple designs stood in stark contrast to the ornate Victorian styles that were resoundingly popular at the time.
American Arts and Crafts architecture encompasses a number of styles popularized in various issues of Craftsman magazine. If you're a fan of this architecture, you're in luck—because of the wide dissemination of the magazine, these homes were popular from the East Coast to California. These are the most popular styles:
Craftsman
Joe Shmelzer / Getty Images
Craftsman-style homes are the most quintessentially American-style of the Arts and Crafts movement, and are characterized by wide, low layouts, gabled roofs, open floor plans, wood framing, and front porches that feature support columns and exposed rafters.
Bungalow
Julian Porcino
American bungalow-style homes were designed to be easy to build, which made them affordable for early-20th century working families. A bungalow is a small house that, traditionally, is only one story high, though today it’s common to find ones whose attic space has been converted into a second-story bedroom.
Bungalows are raised from the sidewalk with a short flight of steps and feature small verandas, overhanging eaves, and dormer windows. Inside, bungalows use their small space efficiently, with tight, compact closets, built-in cabinets, and shelving.
Tudor
Jeff Vinnick / Stringer
Originating in Great Britain and popular among the monied classes, Tudor houses — which are sometimes known as Tudor Revival, Mock Tudor, or Jacobean style— are large, multi-story houses made of brick with large sections of half-timbered white stucco siding, giving them a medieval appearance. Tudors have steeply-pitched gabled roofs with decorative chimney pots, narrow, multi-paned windows, and wooden front doors. Inside, Tudor-style homes feature plaster walls, arched doorways, beamed ceilings, and wood details.
A Moody Makeover Totally Transformed This Seattle Tudor-Style Home
results of the “Designed and Made in Russia” contest — PORUSSKI.me
The contest is held by the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts in the biennale format for the second time.
This year the organizing committee received 1122 applications from 90 Russian cities. The ceremony of announcing the winners served as the starting point for the opening of the thematic exhibition.
One of the features of this contest is that both novice designers and experienced craftsmen had equal chances to win. Some of the works were created in collaboration with factories and are already ready for production. In fact, each of the works included in the shortlist of the competition is both a unique piece of art and a very real handicraft product.
The Grand Prix of the competition was given to designers from St. Petersburg Daniil Karamushkin and Anna Ivanova. Their work "Interlacing of Stone Threads" will be bought by the concept store "Chambers" for transfer to the collection of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts. This is just the beginning of the formation of a modern design collection for the museum: the first exhibit was purchased in 2018.
"Interlacing of stone threads" - ceramic ceiling lamps created according to author's models and printed on a 3D printer. The authors of the project basically created not so much a design as an already finished, thought-out concept, ready for re-implementation. “Creating these forms, we tried to make it difficult to repeat them manually,” Anna and Daniil say. “This is a symbiosis of artistic intent and technological implementation.”
In addition to the awards awarded by the professional jury, the competition has its own "audience award": on the site you can vote for your favorite work. The results of the popular vote will be summed up on November 21, 2020, and the winner will receive a special prize from SMIRNOV DESIGN.
The exhibition itself is divided into two semantic parts. The hall with out-of-competition works looks like we are used to seeing museum halls, while the competitive exhibits are grouped not by nominations or categories.
Exhibition designer Ekaterina Vinogradova has actually created living environments where objects can coexist like details in a home interior.
The competition jury was international and brought together experts from all over the world, which made the selection process especially intriguing.
“It seems to me that the mentality of our jury members certainly influenced their opinion,” comments the curator of the competition, Natalya Loginova, head of the Fashion and Design Center of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts. “But that's what's interesting. The fact is that designers one way or another “stew in their own juice”. And the museum has the opportunity to bring in third-party experts of the highest level to get a distant, objective view. And, I believe, many of the directors of Western design museums invited by us had no idea what to expect from the competitive works of Russian designers.”
The very mission of this competition is to create an up-to-date image of Russian design, recognizable all over the world.
At the same time, looking at the entire exposition, it is difficult to say that the works have something in common. Perhaps, to understand the roots, to look for the origins of ideas or the stories that inspired designers are interesting only to specialists. A simple viewer is not required to know and understand this. The viewer should just feel it: not on a conscious, but on an emotional level.
The exhibition will run until January 10, 2021.
Photo: contest organizing committee, Sasha Snegova.
contest. damuseum
contest. Tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Russian folk crafts: artistic painting
04.11.2021
Folk crafts of Russia - our history and culture. This is an art that covers many areas: everyday life, folklore, music, dances.
One of the large-scale areas in folk crafts is artistic painting. This type of art differs by regional affiliation or style. We will tell you about the main popular areas of artistic painting of Russian folk crafts. You can find and buy products made in these techniques on our website. Welcome to the world of Russian art!
- A bit about artistic painting
- Gzhel painting
- Khokhloma painting
- Zhostovo painting
- Semikarakorsk painting
- Gorodets painting
- Majolica
- Crafts of the peoples of the North:
- Old Borok
- Boretskaya painting
- Mezen painting
- Puchuzh painting
- Rakul painting
A bit about artistic painting
Initially, special masters were engaged in artistic painting. Such items were rare and luxurious. Later, artistic painting began to spread and acquire a large scale of production. Painted products could already be found in every home in the form of cutting boards, rolling pins and plates.
These are products that are made by Russian craftsmen by hand in the traditions of folk crafts. Each item is unique and inimitable, has its own character, creative energy and history. Such goods will be an unusual gift for any occasion and a beautiful addition to the interior.
Folk arts and crafts - crafts based on the manufacture of products from various materials (clay, wood, metal) and decorating them with hand-painted.
Any trade originates from domestic or rural craft, in which craftsmen created essential items - dishes, spinning wheels, chests, etc.
Crafts improved with the invention of tools, the search for new materials and the development of science and technology. Now you can find handicrafts of extraordinary beauty in color, shape and quality. But the only thing that remains unchanged is the process of creation - products are still painted by hand using paints and brushes.
Gzhel painting
Gzhel is one of the most famous and favorite types of Russian folk painting on porcelain.
Porcelain is a type of ceramic made from a mixture of clay, quartz and kaolin. This material is quite stable, does not pass gas and water.
Products are made in several stages:
- First, the craftsmen pour the objects from a high-quality mixture and fire them.
- Next, painting is carried out. The drawing is done with one paint (cobalt), which after processing becomes blue. The substance is diluted with water, patterns are applied with strokes, lines, and plant motifs appear in the ornament. The pattern is displayed on the surface accurately and quickly.
- The last step is glazing and control firing to preserve the design and make the product durable.
Initially, Gzhel was multicolored, but in the 19th century blue and white became the main shades. However, colored products in the Gzhel technique are still found.
The painting in the Gzhel style is very memorable, these folk art items will become practical gifts and decorate the interior! You can find Gzhel dishes in a special section.
See Gzhel painting
Khokhloma painting
Khokhloma is perhaps the most famous type of Russian folk painting on wood. Products with Khokhloma painting appeared after the liberation from the Tatar-Mongol yoke. The inhabitants of the Khokhloma village and nearby villages were fed by this trade. Later, wooden products with red curls thundered all over the world, were loved in Paris, India and Central Asia.
Wooden products with Khokhloma painting are relevant to this day.
They are made of wood and painted by craftsmen by hand. Primary colors: red, black and gold. But Khokhloma gold is only an appearance. In fact, the wood is covered with silver tin, which, after firing in the oven and coating with linseed oil, acquires an expensive golden hue. A dark background enhances contrast.
Characteristic elements of Khokhloma painting are rowan, viburnum and strawberry berries, as well as birds and animals.
You will find these and other products with Khokhloma painting in a special section.
See Khokhloma painting
Zhostovo painting
Zhostovo painting is an artistic technique of drawing on metal trays. The painting style is floral. Four types of compositions are taken as a basis: a collected bouquet, a scattered bouquet, a wreath and a garland.
The craft originated at the beginning of the 19th century, in the village of Zhostovo, Moscow Region, as a prototype of the modified Tagil painting. Initially, papier-mache figures were decorated with this style, but with the development of metallurgy, the craftsmen switched to painting iron trays.
The trays themselves are made from sheet metal in round, rectangular, octagonal and oval shapes. The first stages of production are priming, puttying, grinding and varnishing the future product. After that, the workpiece goes to the painter.
When painting Zhostovo trays, oil paints on turpentine are used, they are applied with soft squirrel brushes. A multi-layered image is created in several stages: underpainting, shade, glare, and the design of the drawing and planting of seeds are completed.
Here you will find trays of different shapes and colors, they can be purchased online and on order.
See Zhostovo painting
Semikarakorskaya painting
Semikarakorskaya painting is a smear underglaze artistic technique that uses gilding and metallization on ceramics, namely faience. This is a relatively new type of Russian folk art, which originated in 1972. However, for its beauty and floral conciseness, Semikarakorsky faience managed to fall in love with the people and collectors.
Earthenware products are distinguished by their environmental friendliness, durability, resistance to high temperatures, water and acids.
This craft is called the multi-colored Don Cossacks, as it absorbed the uncompromising spirit of freedom of this people, the riot of colors and picturesque traditions of the land.
The main motif of the painting is bright floral ornaments with an emphasis on a large flower. They also draw everyday scenes in the style of popular prints from Cossack folklore.
See the special section for author's products made in the technique of Semikarakorsk painting.
See Semikarakorsk painting
Gorodets painting
Gorodets painting is artistic painting and woodcarving, originated in the middle of the 19th century in the Nizhny Novgorod province. Initially, the craft consisted in the manufacture of carved spinning wheels. The product was cut from one type of wood with recesses, and figures were cut out from another type, which were inserted into the recesses of the spinning wheel. So did different ornaments and drawings.
Later, carved paintings were painted with different colors, combining brightness with a touch of wood. Fully painted items were at first festive. But a little later they began to be used on a daily basis. Over time, the craftsmen practically abandoned carving - so the production technique became simpler and faster. Drawings began to decorate chests, furniture, sleighs, interior items and toys.
The painting had a certain plot: the masters depicted animals, flowers, everyday and festive scenes. One of the most popular today are the images of a black horse and a bird.
This type of fishing is still popular today. Russian masters continue to amaze with original souvenirs.
View Gorodets painting
Majolica
Majolica is a special ancient technique for making and painting ceramics. The craft takes its origin from the traditional crafts of the countries of the Ancient East. Later, the production technique penetrated into Europe. The Spaniards were the first to produce ceramic products in this style - they made clay tiles for building houses. And in the 19th century, craftsmen from Florence began to cover products made of porous clay with glaze. Having mastered and fell in love with this craft, Spain began to sell goods abroad. The products were called "majolica" - in honor of the island of Mallorca, through which goods were sent to other countries.
Majolica came to Russia during the reign of Peter I and immediately fell in love with our people. In the 18th century, the first factory for the production of ceramic products using the majolica technique appeared in Russia. Crockery was in great demand. Such products became popular throughout the country, our artists and collectors loved them. Russian craftsmen skillfully mastered this craft, and now majolica is definitely one of the Russian folk crafts.
For the production of such products, whole red clay is taken, which is easy to melt. Currently, some manufacturers add synthetic substances to increase the strength of the product. Ceramics is made in several stages. First, a mold is made and fixed by firing in a kiln. After the product is painted, covered with glaze and the pattern is fixed by repeated firing.
View majolica
Crafts of the peoples of the North
Crafts of the peoples of the North - types of artistic painting on wood, connected by the territory of origin and the motifs used.
These types of painting were partly borrowed from each other and appeared at approximately the same time. However, each technique has distinctive features and characteristics. Let's talk a little about them.
Old Borok
Old Borok is one of the most ancient types of painting in the Russian North. The existence of the village, where the craft originated, was known as early as the 15th century.
The difference between Old Borok and other types of northern painting lies in the monotonous plot and three-tiered pattern, when the coating is applied in several layers. Most often, this technique depicts fabulous red birds with green wings. And on large compositions, the central place is occupied by a tree made in the same colors.
See Old Borok painting
Boretskaya painting
Boretskaya painting is a North Russian painting on wood, which originated in ancient Novgorod and is named after the boyar family.
Primary colors are red, green, yellow and bare wood.
Elements are outlined in black.
Previously, wrestling painting was performed in an icon-painting manner. Now characteristic ornaments are flowers and geometric shapes: rhombuses, triangles, small circles and drops.
See wrestling painting
Mezen painting
Mezenskaya, or palashchelskaya, painting is a craft that originated in the second half of the 19th century. The name comes from the village of Palashchelye, which is located on the right bank of the Mezen River. Masters decorate wooden household utensils with this painting.
A distinctive feature of the painting is the plot scenes of a hunt or a duel. Traditionally, 2 paints are used: red, obtained from clay, and black, from soot. Images of horses, deer, birds and fish are combined with geometric and floral ornaments. Also in the painting, repeating elements are often found - strokes, curls and wavy lines.
See Mezen painting
Puchuzhskaya painting
Puchuga painting appeared among the northern peoples in the village of Puchuga, located on the Dvina River in the Arkhangelsk region.
