The Meaning of Home

Edwin Heathcote

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781011652
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

We are so familiar with the features of our homes, the myriad little decorative details, that we have forgotten how to see them. We might look at a church, read a book or watch a film and attempt to understand its symbolism and its references, but we rarely look at our homes in the same light. Yet from the most ordinary apartment to the most extravagant mansion, every home is a deep well of echoes. Windows to wardrobes, fireplaces to door knockers, Edwin Heathcote attempts to fathom the elements of our everyday domestic lives. The Meaning of Home explores how we build our houses on the souls of our ancestors: how ritual and symbolic elements transmute over time into practical features, and how often this symbolic charge ensures that those features last long after their practical uses are forgotten. After reading this scintillating book, home will never look quite the same again.

1

FRONT DOORS

EVEN THE MOST ORDINARY ELEMENT of the most mundane of houses can carry within it memories and layers of culture and history, meanings and symbols. That we have lost the ability to read them makes our lives poorer and has stolen from us the capacity to engage with our surroundings on a level more meaningful than that of the image. Take a door – a good, solid, panelled Georgian door. One of the most familiar will do just fine: the shiny black door of 10 Downing Street.

The door is a crossing, a junction marking the divide between the realm of the public and the private, between the chaos of the unformed world outside and the sacrosanct order within, and as such it represents a profoundly symbolic moment that needs to be marked.

The doors of temples or grand houses used to be oriented towards the rising sun to catch the morning rays (the word ‘orientation’, towards the east, derives from this). It was a kind of sacred awakening; opening the door, a mini-ritual, welcomed in the sun and the light of the new day. The primal fear of pre-enlightenment societies was that the sun wouldn’t rise anew the next morning. The Egyptians envisaged the passage of the sun through the underworld as a journey between two gates beneath us. The door became the earthly equivalent of those sun gates. Each time the sun rose again it was a cause for small celebration and thanksgiving.

Later this significance became translated into symbolic, material form. The temple doors of Rome were clad in gilt bronze, and the arches above Byzantine doorways of Venice are adorned with golden mosaics or carvings of the sun and moon. This tribute transmogrified into a more modest brass threshold that would be polished each morning to reflect the light. These can still be seen in Victorian terraces as much as in gentlemen’s clubs. Brass is the quotidian version of gold, the material manifestation of the sun. Now take a look at that Downing Street door. It is adorned with a lion’s head doorknocker (in brass, of course). The lion was similarly the symbol of the sun, his golden mane a plume of flame. Above the door a fan light with radiating glazing bars once again symbolically represents the rising sun, behind the glass you can just make out the wrought-iron rays of a protective grille tapering into nothing.

As if all this weren’t enough, a lantern hangs suspended above the door so that even at night the meaning remains clear and is reinforced by the light emanating from the false sun of the fanlight, a symbol of protection from darkness.

The door leaf itself is the element within architecture that represents the resident. It imposes human scale on the façade and, as such, is vaguely anthropomorphic in form. Its tripartite division (legs, body, head) are there in the panels, while at its centre the doorknob as navel and the letterbox as, well, perhaps that’ll do for the moment.

It might seem a plain kind of door, but in the Spartan, stripped-back tradition of Georgian building, the door was effectively the only element that could be embellished. The sparse bare brick walls, self-effacing windows and parapet concealing the form of the roof left only the entrance as a decorative element. Its knobs and knockers, fanlight and panels were the language of humanization, and although it may seem a modest kind of ornamentation, because the architecture is so plain, any decorative elements at all take on far greater symbolic and social significance than they otherwise might on a more decorated structure.

The fanlight survives today in the cheapest of catalogue doors, now transposed on to the door leaf itself, a motif which makes no architectural sense at all (the semi-circular opening reflects the structural brick arch above) but which retains within it the memory of that sun-like archetype. The panels are still present too, now pressed into a mulch of fibres stiffened into pseudo-timber with glue and powder, again retaining only the vaguest memory of the door’s original construction. Doors were made of a solid timber frame infilled with slightly thinner panels. This made the door lighter and cheaper to construct from more slender timbers but also created an elegant decorative plane with a deceptively complex language of mouldings and chamfers.

The lion’s head knocker has survived as a DIY staple whilst the lantern above has moved to the side to become the almost poetically clichéd coachlight. The front door embodies ownership, expressing the occupant. The handing over of keys remains a hugely symbolic moment, whilst their insertion carries unmissable sexual undertones and the sacrality of crossing is maintained in the custom of carrying the bride over the threshold. The strange meaning behind this ritual is the avoidance of evil spirits which were thought to lurk in the liminal zone of the threshold, a boundary which is neither within nor without. For a bride to trip on her first entry to the house would have been seen as a dreadful omen, a portent of bad luck to come, and a possibility best avoided. It is extraordinary how widespread this custom is; it is one of the few traditions to cross cultural boundaries around the world.

The ghost of Jacob Marley famously appears to Scrooge in the brass knocker, a manifestation of the spirit of the threshold. The threshold itself is a curious survivor. Its purpose is both symbolic and functional. It would have once served to stop water entering the dwelling and also perhaps to fix the doorframe in place. But it is the most critical boundary of the dwelling, a thin line demarcating the public and the private. To cross it uninvited is to trespass, to commit a crime. The diminution of the architectural expression of the threshold (who now polishes brass or marble doorsteps?) has led to its symbolic significance being replaced by the doormat. This prickly carpet is similarly a symbolic moment, the point of a ritual cleansing of the shoes before entering the sacred realm of the home. To wipe your feet is a mark of respect. The cast-iron boot scrapers built into the porches of some houses presents another ritual (although once very practical) moment. It is comparable to the stoup in a church – a water receptacle often similarly built into a recess in the wall in the narthex of a church. The dipping of the finger into the holy water and the making of the sign of the cross is a moment of ritual, if not real, cleansing, just as are the mat and the scraper. At the entrance to 10 Downing Street there are a pair of cast iron bootscrapers, one to either side of the door – they have a sun motif at their tops. Then there is the rarer survival of the red carpet laid out for auspicious guests, another symbolic setting out of a privileged route but also an extension of the interior to the exterior – a sign that for this visitor the house is open and welcoming – which is exactly what the ‘Welcome’ door mat does.

Many of the doors contemporary with Number 10 would have had steps leading up to the door, a device to bridge the area which gave light to the basement windows below but which also allowed the elevation of the ground floor above the filth and ordure which covered the streets. These steps also create a space apart, an idea that this is the way in to somewhere special. In Dutch houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth century – which share their sparse, protestant aesthetic with those of London, the device was made more of in the creation of a stoop. This has nothing to do with the stoup in a church but is rather an elevated plane which bridges the realm of the city and the realm of the interior. It was the Dutch who effectively invented the bourgeois interior (so beautifully depicted in the art of the era) and the subtlety of this distinction, the creation of an in-between zone of semi-public and semi-private interaction between the two worlds, is characteristic of the sophistication of Dutch architecture. This was a place often provided with a built-in bench (many of these can still be seen on the streets of Amsterdam) where a traveller or tradesman could wait or rest or where a housewife could talk to her neighbours or a gentleman could smoke his pipe while watching the world outside. The stoop (its etymology derives simply from the German for ‘step’) was adopted by the Dutch settlers in America and then by their British successors and it became an archetype of a mythical big city lifestyle. People sitting on their stoops create and reinforce community and maintain their own policing of the streets.

The front door – and the area around it – remains a strange and powerfully enduring reminder of superstition and myth. The survival of the most recognisable of domestic motifs into an era when both their constructional and symbolic logic has long disappeared is extraordinary. The cheapest, mass-produced, pressed and formed MDF door leaves still embody worlds of long-lost symbolism. Sun worship, demons and omens, fear, light, sex, life and death are all expressed in an architectural element that has become so familiar that its articulation has become invisible to us. And that’s just the door.

2

HALLS

THE HALL WAS ONCE all there was. The hall-house of medieval England was a roof, open to the rafters, over a single barn of a space. It was the space for eating and sleeping, for receiving guests, for cooking, for relaxing and for celebrating. So how did the hall become reduced to the meagre, dingy, windowless corridor familiar from emasculated modern apartments and housing? A leftover lobby reserved more for the human husks of coats and shoes rather than for the human beings themselves?

The medieval hall, despite being a single space, had its own internal hierarchy. A microcosmic version of the nave of a church, a big hall featured a raised dais (the equivalent of a sanctuary) rather like a stage, upon which the master and his family would dine and possibly sleep. Oxford and Cambridge colleges, with their High Table, retain the clear memory of this arrangement, as does the idea of a ‘top table’ at a wedding or reception. The hall gradually atrophied in importance as the Great Chamber, a (slightly) more private bedroom, emerged. But it remained the symbol of the householder’s status, the principal public room. As dwellings morphed first into mansions and then into urban houses the staircase appeared, growing from the floor of the hall like a tree supporting the upper floors.

The arrival of the staircase – in the finest houses a grand, sculptural statement – radically altered the nature of the hall. It became a circulation space, the room of introduction, movement and transition. Intriguingly, the etymology of ‘hall’ (‘heall’ or ‘covered place’ in Old English) is the same as ‘hell’. The hall, to paraphrase Sartre, is other people.

It is in essence a social space, the internal, domestic equivalent of the town square. The coats, boots and umbrellas, and the stone or marble floors, were a reminder of its nature as an interface between the interior and the exterior. Only a generation ago, a hall table would have always been crowned with a telephone, more evidence of its border condition between the worlds of the public and the private.

In the terraced house or apartment, the hall retains the memory of its former grandeur, there may be a dappling of light from a stained glass porch window, the only place stained glass is likely to appear, or perhaps from a fanlight above the door. A mirror often adorns the wall, the last vestige of the decoration that would have once announced and reflected the act of entrance, whilst the newel on the balustrade, crowned by a wooden globe, stands like a memory of a footman. The hall generated its own particular species of curious furniture – the half-tables and consoles squashed against the wall, the hall stands, benches and trunks that are often placed more in order to populate this under-used space than to be themselves used. Each contributes to the idea of the hall as a place purely intended to project character, its own use never explicitly defined. But they also constitute an odd taxonomy of surreal items that mean nothing on their own but can exist only when used in conjunction with the walls squeezing a narrow space. The hall stand, that combination of umbrella holder, coat and hat stand and mirror is a typically hybrid, attenuated object like the half console table, which looks as if it might also poke into the hall next door.

Apartments contain a more complex layering of symbol and use as the boundaries between public space, residents-only space and the realm of the explicitly private build up. The well-to-do New York apartment block offers an intriguing series of transitions from street to home: the carpet, the canopy, the doorman, a plush lobby visible through glass but not accessible from the street (but which acts as a formal reception space for waiting), the elevator, the lobby, and only then the hall. It is a complex choreography of transition, echoed in slightly less hierarchical terms in the London mansion block or the Parisian apartment building, and it is a typology that owes much to the idea of the grand hotel as the ideal dwelling, projecting a fantasy of service and luxury onto a public face. The communal hall, like its relative the lobby, is a functionally useless place, built purely to impress adorned with marble surfaces, sconces, flowers, it bears that anonymous, under-used luxury of a hotel. Yet it also creates that critical first impression, a moment of architectural theatre, setting the scene.

Hermann Muthesius, a German writer whose 1905 book The English House held up British domestic architecture as the finest in the world, noted that the hall represented ‘one of the most attractive assets of the English House.… The particular form of the hall’, he wrote, was the ‘elaboration of a romantic chain of thought’ weaving ‘a special magic round this room’.

If Muthesius represented the warmth and memory of the hall as a place of humanity and domestic embrace, the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi painted its opposite in the same year: the cool, existential crisis of emptiness exemplified in White Doors. Here, the hall appears as a place of cold neutrality, empty of people and furniture, eerie, haunting, presaging an age of angst and social isolation.

Ultimately, the hall, however grand, is leftover space. It is the area that needs to be devoted to necessary circulation rather than actual life. In that way it embodies a curious position between grudging acceptance (which always leads to it being too small and mean) and ostentatious grandeur (which is a naked display of wealth – a gesture to show that the owners are so wealthy they can afford to waste space). In either case the hall occupies an odd, liminal position and one that is always curiously underutilized. Why shouldn’t it become a space for living? As the most public part of the dwelling its role as mere transitional space seems a waste. Celebrate it.

3

LIVING ROOMS

LIVING ROOM, AS OPPOSED, I used to wonder, to what exactly? Not living room? Living dead room? Dying room? Dead room?

Well, yes, it turns out. Exactly. The living room is the modern, sanitized term for the parlour, the formal room at the front of the house (front room). This is the room that was once reserved for special occasions, and one special occasion more than any other – death. The bodies of deceased family members were laid out on biers or trestles for a wake, a final domestic resting place before burial. A room that was to provide a place for the dead demanded a certain decorum, a dignity, this was a room not merely to be enjoyed, or even much inhabited, but one in which to be respectable. The family’s treasures, its art, its best furniture and carpets, the objects through which their achievements could be read were strewn about this room, protected from the outside by heavy shutters and drapes.

Today it seems a curious conceit that the best room in the house be given over, in effect, to the dead, yet traces of this idea of decorum, of the maintenance of a ‘best’ room in the manner of a ‘best’ suit remain. In working class households until recently life was often lived in the kitchen – the only consistently heated space in the house – where people ate, read, bathed and met their neighbours – who came in from the back alley. The front room was preserved – like the cellophane-shrouded three-piece suite – for best. A film like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning illustrates this perfectly, this was the realm of the fearsome matriarch vigilantly controlling the social and spatial flows.

The middle classes and those aspiring to middle class existence used their living rooms more, though they too almost certainly maintained a room for best. If we look at Robert S. Tait’s painting Thomas and Jane Carlyle in the Living Room of their House in Cheyne Row, Chelsea (1857) we see a couple looking rather bored, despite being, of course, two of the most interesting Victorians. Carlyle is playing with his pipe by the fireplace; Jane is sitting, staring in a chair. It has the muted feel of a dull Sunday even though the room itself is spacious and bright, its double doors open to reveal the rest of the house. Ironically, the living room is the also deadest room. It is a feel that remains almost unchanged for another century. Think of Celia Johnson’s character in Brief Encounter on the verge of a breakdown with her decent, dull husband doing a crossword in his armchair – classic suburban torpor – or of Pooter in his dull Holloway suburban living room (‘The Laurels’) or of the unbearably oppressive boredom of the living room in Bryan Forbes’ 1964 Séance on a Wet Afternoon. You can flit between early Victorian and Kitchen Sink drama to get the impression of an ill-used, awkward kind of place, which can seem strange to us.

In the Georgian era the front room was situated on the piano nobile, elevated to the first floor, looking down on the world, and this was a room for entertaining, for dining, for dancing. The Victorians, however, moved it back down and the front room became a very Victorian kind of façade, a room intended to project an image to the world, far more about presentation than about use. It became the most highly decorated room, with masses of ornate furniture, pictures, mouldings, perhaps a frieze and a tiled and cast-iron fireplace. But it also became dusty, musty and dim. In recent years this internal apartheid between a front and rear parlour (and often kitchen too) has been eroded as occupants have knocked through the ground floor to create a single living space, albeit one which is often curiously misaligned and unsettlingly asymmetrical.

The modern era has seen the focus of the room shift from the coffin to the box.

There were formerly three foci for the living room: the window (which gave light by which to read), the fireplace (the domestic altar which gave warmth but which also acted as a kind of shrine, the mantelpiece of museum of memories and mementoes) and the piano. These have been replaced entirely by the TV, which has somehow never quite been incorporated into the architecture – as if acknowledging its centrality to everyday life is some kind of admission of failure. This has unbalanced the contemporary living room entirely. We have sofas looking into what appears to be a void. This is why, ironically, these rooms work so well on TV: the ensemble looking at the TV – us looking back at them. Whether it belongs to the Simpsons or to the Royle family, the TV-focused sofa has become shorthand for the blue-collar dwelling, amiable slobbishness.

Eating in front of the TV, we are often told, has killed conversation (over 50 per cent of families in the UK and the US eat more meals in front of the TV than together than at the table), which is ironic, as one of the living room’s other names is the ‘parlour’ from the French parler, to talk. Yet, in a curious way, contemporary trends have revived the Victorian tradition of the front room as a representative space. Minimal int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Home is where the Heart Is
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Front Doors
• 2 Halls
• 3 Living Rooms
• 4 Fireplaces
• 5 Mouldings
• 6 Books
• 7 Dining Rooms
• 8 Kitchens
• 9 Stairs
• 10 Cellars & Attics
• 11 Bedrooms
• 12 Cupboards & Wardrobes
• 13 Bathrooms
• 14 Ironmongery & Hardware
• 15 Doors
• 16 Windows
• 17 Facades & Faces
• 18 Bay Windows & Balconies
• 19 Sheds, Huts & Treehouses
• 20 Swimming Pools
• 21 Roofs
• 22 Fences & Gates
• 23 Miniaturization & Representation
• 24 Mirrors
• 25 Porches, Verandas & Decks
• 26 Lights
• 27 Floors
• 28 Walls
• 29 Corridors
• 30 Ceilings
• 31 Studies & Libraries
• 32 Christmas
• 33 Columns & Pillars
• 34 Pipes, Wires & Sewers
• Afterword: Time, Ghosts & The Uncanny
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright