cosy corner

Until the year 1000 people cooked and heated on an open fire on the floor in the middle of the main room, as can be seen in the Boarhunt Hall in the Weald and Downland open-air museum. There was no chimney, and the smoke escaped through open windows and through gaps in the covering of the gabled roof.

Later, a mezzanine chamber was inserted so that the space reached right up to the sloping roof, as we see in the Winkhurst Tudor kitchen in the same museum. The open fire was placed against an exterior wall. Although the whole dwelling was erected in timber frame, this part of the wall was built in natural stone.

That development continued: the space for the discharge of the smoke remained across the whole width of the room, but the bay became narrower. Later, a chimney appeared, though still timber-framed, and eventually a brick-built chimney, which could stand either in the room or be expressed in the exterior. The open hearth no longer extended sideways to the exterior walls but acquired brick-built side walls.

 

It became a small room within the large living space, where, besides the pot on the fire, chairs could stand and the cradle could lie.

The inglenooks were open hearths with brick-built seats along one or both sides. They already existed in seventeenth-century England, as can be seen in the Daniel Hummus house.

Gradually, the open hearths disappeared in favour of stoves and later central heating. The built-in seats near a heating appliance remained. They took the form of cosy corners and by the end of the nineteenth century had become an important element in domestic furnishing. An early example is found in the living room of the own house of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), which he built at the age of 22. Although small stoves already existed then, architects preferred to build in small open hearths, to preserve the direct contact with the fire. The cosy corner is a small room, which can be partitioned with curtains. Wright built in a clever device: above the hearth, where one would expect the chimney, the wall steps in and there is a mirror. The flue runs invisibly to the right.

The heyday of the cosy corners and the built-in furniture is found with the architects who followed the Arts and Crafts style, such as the Briton Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott (1865–1945). In the house Blackwell of 1898–1900 there is a cosy corner in the entrance hall, one in the dining room, and one in the white drawing room.

In almost all his houses Baillie Scott incorporated one or more cosy corners, such as in the dining room of the house at Glen Falcon.

Across the ocean the brothers Charles (1868–1957) and Henry (1870–1954) Greene worked in a similar way in the Gamble house of 1908.

The publisher Walter Blackie (1860–1953) had his Hill House built from 1902 to 1904, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and his wife Margaret Macdonald (1864–1933). In the bedroom there is a cosy corner. The furnishing is a fine example of Scottish art nouveau in a lighter style, both in colour and in weight, than the more rustic approach of the brothers Greene.

A similar approach is found in the Austrian geometrical art nouveau, as in the entrance hall of the Kleines Landhaus at the Vienna Kunstschau in 1908, built and furnished by the furniture factory of the brothers Kohn and designed by Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956). Here we see not only the well-known chair with adjustable back, the Sitzmachine, but also a fine built-in cosy corner.

The Netherlands was the country where, after the First World War, most innovations arose, with the Amsterdam School, the Nieuwe Haagse School, the De Stijl movement and, finally, the Nieuwe Bouwen. Piet Kramer (1881–1961), one of the representatives of the Amsterdam School, designed in 1920 the library for the existing house in the Weteringschans 141. The photograph below is from around 1930, which may explain the metal structure on the bureau furniture, with the same structure as the small table that Breuer created in 1925 in the Bauhaus. The wall unit, composed of bookshelves, a chest of drawers and a long seat, is indeed from 1920. The rounded front edges of the bookshelves are still remnants of the Amsterdam School, but otherwise this wall unit is extremely modern and functional. One can regard the library as a forerunner of the bureau-fumoir of Huib Hoste five years later.

Co Brandes (1884–1955) was, together with Jan Wils (1891–1972), one of the most important architects of the Nieuwe Haagse School, which shows influences of the simplicity of Berlage, the homeliness of the Arts and Crafts, and the emerging De Stijl movement, although Frank Lloyd Wright was never forgotten either. In the sitting area of the Villa Meyenhage of 1918 the walls are in brick. The cosy corner is a bench, built in beside the stove.

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The combination of sitting area and fireplace was abandoned during that period.

In the interiors of De Stijl we rarely encounter built-in sitting areas, because of their standpoint of abstraction of the space and the separation of the components. We do, however, find simple built-in benches in the photographic studio of Henri Berssenbrugge in The Hague, which was completed in 1921 and for which Jan Wils had designed the interior and the furniture, and Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960) the colour composition.

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Cor Alons (1892–1967) worked after his training in the furniture factory H. Pander & Zn. In 1923 he resigned and founded with Frits Spanjaard (1889–1978) a design office. In the same year Kees Van Santen founded, together with his wife, an interior design and art business under the name: Applied Art. He built a model room in the shop, co-designed by Cor Alons. All of them belonged to the first generation of interior architects.

 

Frits Spanjaard furnished in 1925 the living room of a house in Delft in the style of the Nieuwe Haagse School. The cosy corner had the then common combination of bench and library. None of the original photographs present in this blog give an image of the subtle colour compositions. For the photograph below we do know the colours: black and orange-brown terracotta for the woodwork, silver-grey for the wallpaper, orange for the silk of the lampshade, and bright green fabric for the mattress.

The interior architects of the Haagse School were in part indebted to Hendrik Wouda (1885–1946), who himself had studied Frank Lloyd Wright. During a journey before the First World War he had become acquainted with the German and Austrian art nouveau. Wouda worked from 1917 to 1933 for the furniture company H. Pander & Zonen. He furnished in 1921 the progressive dwelling Sevensteyn of the architect Willem Martinus Dudok (1884–1974). In 1925 he showed in the Dutch pavilion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels a bureau space, for which he received the ‘diplôme d’honneur’, a distinction below that of the gold medal. One of the best-known houses which he realised in the 1920s and 1930s in the The Hague region was the Villa De Luifel, completed in 1924. He had the cupboards and the bench of the sitting room built in.

 

The villa for the Kessler family on the Slingerduin estate from 1928–1929 was a collaboration between the architect Henri Antoon van Anrooy (1885–1964) and the interior architect Wouda. The interior is carefully composed, at once monumental and restrained. Wouda worked with furniture groupings which are composed both functionally and aesthetically, with an asymmetrical composition. Wouda said of his method: ‘I do not see a loose piece of furniture as an object “an sich”, but I see it only as part of the interior, as fragment of the spatial collectivity.’ The bureau in the living room stands at right angles to the wall and forms a whole with the cupboard. The built-in sitting area is located at the corner window. The materials and colours are: furniture in natural and black oak, matt gold wall covering and upholstery in green, blue and orange. Later Wouda designed some pieces of furniture for Metz & Co.

 

The tradition of built-in sitting areas beside or around an open hearth was continued in the art deco. Henry Jacques Le Même (1897–1997) became known with a chalet which he built in 1926 for the baroness Noémie de Rothschild. Both in the living room and in the bureau there are cosy corners.

 

Where the built-in seats had earlier lain in a dark inner corner of the room, the architects preferred from the end of the 1920s to place these by the windows, according to the conception of modernism of the healing effect of the sun’s rays. In 1929 the architect Han Van Loghem (1881–1940) enlarged the villa ‘de Waterlelie’, which he had built in 1918 for M.G. Donker, with a garden room. A large corner window with sliding parts looks out over the Zuider Buiten Spaarne. Beneath it sits a corner sofa between two tablets.

 

Such seating arrangements, which no longer fall under the heading of ‘cosy corners’, already occurred around the turn of the century 1900, namely by the bay windows, as in the Hill House.

 

Entirely in modernist style André Lurçat (1894–1970) designed for the Maison Hefferlin of 1931–1932 a U-shaped low piece of furniture consisting of a library, a plant container and a canapé.

 

The cosy corner of the house Peeters a year later proves that Gaston Eysselinck (1907–1953) considered homeliness and comfort more important than the purified form of the international style. The sofa stands in a blue niche in a white interior wall.