Strangely modern

While on holiday we popped into Coleton Fishacre. For those who do not know the place, Wikipedia has this summary

The house at Coleton Fishacre was built as a country home for Rupert D'Oyly Carte and his wife, Lady Dorothy Carte, between 1923 and 1926. The architect was Oswald Milne, a former assistant to Edwin Lutyens, who designed the house with the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement in mind: simplicity of design and quality of craftsmanship. The influence of this older movement notwithstanding, the house is influenced by its own time, especially in its Art Deco interior. 

An interesting house from an interesting period. Completed in the year of the General Strike, it is unsurprisingly modern and yet noting that it is quite modern comes as something of a surprise too. A huge number of us live in houses of a similar age or older, but this one has been furnished to resemble its original internal appearance from a century ago.

Yet apart from some obvious clues such as brass light switches, Lalique light shades, deco furniture and antiquated kitchen equipment the interior still feels remarkably up to date even though it obviously isn't. Bedrooms even have washbasin surrounds decorated with tiles made from recycled glass. Did somebody read the Manchester Guardian I wonder? One could easily live in the house today and that feels a little odd because the interior is almost a hundred years old. 

Take a look at the saloon pictured above. Imagine the Jazz Age background music played while we were there. Why is that odd? Maybe it isn’t, but this visitor was left wondering why we have made so few improvements to the domestic interior, as if there were hardly any worthwhile improvements to be made so we did not make them. That was not the case for ordinary people, but millions soon had all that Coleton Fishacre had apart from size, servants and setting. This has been improved too -

Or has it? How about this?

The world has certainly moved on from the nineteen twenties and taken us to where we are now, but after strolling around Coleton it is easy to imagine the vague shapes of an alternative future. Coleton seems to have embedded within it a range of possibilities, a range of practical ideals we could have adopted but never did, the best of which never took root and perhaps never could have taken root within the feckless agitations of human nature. Yet they are still there to haunt us, those ghosts of what might have been.

It is as if Coleton shows us a future where we might have made ourselves more aware of what is good and what works, what enhances life and what does not, what lasts and what is ephemeral and why that matters. The house has a timeless and even virtuous solidity we have managed to discard because cheap and disposable keep the show on the road while solidity does not and virtue has become political anyway.

Running counter to that thought is an irresistible temptation is to compare the best of the present with the grimmer aspects of 1926 and there is no shortage of those. We have so much that our ancestors did not. Vaccination, prosperity, the welfare state, mass education, all these changes reflect a harsh light onto the past. They also obscure the view. We cannot easily put them to one side and compare our present with an alternative timeline which never happened. And yet one is bound to wonder...