Arts and Crafts Master ─ The Houses and Gardens of M.H. Baillie Scott

A romantic vision of the finest Arts and Crafts architect.

Practicing from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of the Second World War, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott exerted a profound influence on English Arts and Crafts architecture and design as well as on the nascent modernist movement. As a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, Baillie Scott adhered to the philosophy that good design should be made available to everyone and should extend from the planning of towns to the creation of dishes and doorknobs. Baillie Scott maintained a characteristically English dedication to the domestic landscape, designing houses and gardens whose exterior forms and interior details were rooted in a romantic vision of vernacular construction and craftsmanship. But his spatial planning signaled a revolution in the organization of interior space, with the development of the open plan—and the introduction of the demotic, modern living room—around the same time that Frank Lloyd Wright was engaging in similar experiments across the Atlantic. Photographer Ian Macdonald-Smith has captured thirty of the most characteristically innovative and charming extant houses designed by Baillie Scott, as well as their delightful gardens, in spectacular full-color photographs taken for this book that express the vibrant craftsmanship and prescient planning of this early-twentieth-century master.

Ian Macdonald-Smith grew up in a house outside London designed by Baillie Scott. He now resides in New York City and in Bermuda. He is the photographer for Rizzoli’s Bermuda Style.