Red House Lane, Bexleyheath DA6 8JF

Phone:

020 8304 9878

Website:

www.nationaltrust.org.uk/red-house

Opening times:

March–Sept Wed–Sun and bank holidays 11:00–17:00; Oct–Dec and mid–end Feb Wed–Sun 11:00–16:15 (last admissions 45mins before closing) by guided tour only. Telephone to book. Closed Jan–mid Feb, Mon–Tue (except bank holidays)

How to get there:

Station: Bexleyheath (from Charing Cross/Waterloo East/London Bridge)

Entry fee:

Admission charge

Recently acquired by the National Trust (2003), Red House is a seminal building of the Arts and Crafts Movement and holds an important place in the history of domestic architecture in Britain. Designed by Philip Webb for his friend the artist and designer William Morris, and built on the site of an old orchard, it was completed in 1859 and became the Morris family home for the following five years. Webb’s first independent commission, the house is generally regarded as the first Arts and Crafts building, although it predates by a quarter of a century the coining of the term. Together with the garden, which ‘clothes’ the house, and its interior, designed by Morris, with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, the house encapsulates the aesthetic of Morris, which rejected heavy Victorian opulence and mass production in favour of simplicity and good craftsmanship and design. The experience of Red House inspired Morris’s foundation, in 1861, of the interior design firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, which produced the wallpapers, fabrics and stained glass furniture so well known today. From 1952–2002 Red House was owned by the Hollamby family, who were sympathetic to its history and who reclaimed much of its original feel, with whitewashed or wallpapered walls, medieval details, such as the staircase with its tall newels, fixed items of furniture such as the hall settle, with unfinished paintings by Morris on the cupboard doors, and stained glass. Continuing restoration will fully restore the house to how it looked in Morris’s day.