A new book entitled Standen: Philip Webb, Morris & Co. and the Creation of an Arts and Crafts Home by Anne Stutchbury in collaboration with fellow authors Tessa Wild, Stephen Ponder, and Alice Strickland, will be published in July of this year by Yale University Press in association with the National Trust’s Cultural Heritage Publishing programme. (Fig. 1)
The book focuses on the Beales’ lived experience and how they collaborated with Philip Webb in the creation of Standen, their Arts and Crafts home with Morris & Co. interiors. Historic photographs and material from the family and estate archives, relating to both the property and its magnificent collection, reveal the extent to which the Beales’ appreciation for the Arts and Crafts Movement influenced the creation of Standen’s decorative interior, its gardens, and the wider estate, from 1890 to the present day. Based on extensive new research, this lavishly illustrated publication combines family and house biographies to weave a rich historical context for Standen and its stories of human experience1.
The following article by Anne Stutchbury explores Standen’s idyllic, countryside location and its importance to the creation of the Beales’ Arts and Crafts home.
An Arts and Craft Home in ‘an Underdeveloped Paradise’2
‘Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.’3
Arts and Crafts protagonist William Morris expressed his strong dislike for the ways of modern life in an article first published in Justice in 1894.4 It was the year that architect Philip Webb, Morris’s lifelong friend, finished building Standen near East Grinstead for James Beale and his wife, Margaret, and their family of seven children. (Fig. 2)
Had Morris ever visited its unspoilt, rural location in Sussex, it would likely have elicited his approval. The estate embodies a sense of place in tune with the sites of Morris’s imagined utopia in News from Nowhere, 1890 in which a future society functions because people find pleasure in nature. The estate’s seemingly unchanged nature, common to urban perceptions of many rural farming communities, was one of the qualities that attracted the Beales when they were looking for a suitable site for their country retreat.
In 1890 the Beales bought land that was previously part of the Saint Hill Manor estate. It consisted of three farms, Hollybush, Standen and Stone, all fully occupied and working.5(Fig. 3).
A detailed description of each farm is outlined in the 1876 auction sale particulars for Saint Hill. Hollybush Farm, dating to the 15th century, is listed as ‘a beautiful pleasure farm’ with ‘views of great beauty and extent’ and was described to appeal to wealthy purchasers like the Beales who could afford to own the land for enjoyment rather than having to earn a living from it. (Fig. 4)
Considered a ‘splendid site for the erection of a MANSION and formation of a park’, it encouraged buyers to envisage the potential for a country home set within a parkland estate. It had ‘a dwelling house with 2 parlours and six bedrooms, outbuildings, and a pretty garden, also farm buildings which included stables for eight horses, a large barn [plus a granary, both dating to the 18th century]’ and a ‘newly built double cottage’. Stone Farm included a farmhouse with seven rooms, farm buildings, Stone Cottage and Willard’s Bridge cottage and garden. Standen Farm was listed simply as ‘a cottage with barn and yards’.
Besides benefiting from a good train connection to London from nearby East Grinstead town, the site was surrounded by beautiful countryside. The rural, agricultural location of the old farmhouse undoubtedly appealed to James Beale, a keen horseman, hunting enthusiast and golfer, and Margaret, a devoted gardener and nature lover.
The Beales were among a growing number of wealthy, middle-class families who could afford to own both a city home and a country retreat, credentials common to many of Morris & Co.’s clients. James Beale (1840–1912), a solicitor from Edgbaston, Birmingham, headed the family law firm, Beale & Co.’s London office at Great George Street, Westminster, and Margaret Beale (1847–1936) was the daughter of a respected Royal Leamington Spa lawyer, Algernon Sydney Field. They had begun their married life at Gordon Square in London in 1870, then moved to Holland Park in 1875, where Helen, the youngest, was born in 1885. (Fig. 5)
Exciting News
Before the Beales purchased the estate near East Grinstead in Sussex, James wrote to his youngest child Helen, aged four, on Sunday 13 April 1890 to tell her some exciting news:
‘Mother and Maggie [second eldest daughter] went with me yesterday afternoon to look at the country house I want to buy, and they liked it very much.’7
James’s letter to Helen talks about buying a country house (Hollybush farmhouse), rather than a site for a new home. It’s feasible they had not fully settled on building a new house at this time. Moreover, within a month of taking possession of the estate in September 1890, Margaret Beale was buying general household items from Maple & Co. and Bridgeland’s, a local supplier, to furnish the old Hollybush farmhouse, perhaps in readiness for her children’s stay there the following Easter. A letter from James to Helen on 29 March 1891 enquired whether she had enjoyed herself at Hollybush and was concerned because the weather had been very cold.8
By this time, the Beales had already engaged a landscape gardener, G. B. Simpson, to draft out plans and Helen may have witnessed work on the planting of two upper plantations and the kitchen garden begin during her stay.9 Just over a week earlier, James Beale had paid a visit to Philip Webb’s office in London on 20 March 1891 to commission him to design a house.10
Philip Webb Designs the New House
Philip Webb sympathetically incorporated the old Hollybush farmhouse into his design for the new house and stable courtyard built between 1891 and 1894. He also built two stone cottages for estate workers in 1895–96. When it was all finished, many of the family rooms were decorated with Morris & Co. wallpapers, curtains and furniture (Fig. 6). The old cottage at Standen in the centre of the estate, on land recorded in the Domesday Book as ‘Standene’, was demolished and the farmstead’s historic name was given to the new house and estate.
Standen’s idyllic location
James Beale’s letters to Helen while she was at school at Roedean in Brighton reveal his thoughts about Standen’s idyllic location and the rural lifestyle that farming the Standen estate afforded: ‘The remaining two Corn Ricks have been thrashed and the Granary over the cart shed is quite full.’ He wrote: ‘I felt quite like a farmer going round and examining it.’ (Fig. 7)
He also mentioned an article he had read in the Pall Mall Gazette which ‘contained a lovely description of the charms of the Coombe Hill Estate’, land neighbouring the Standen estate. He had purchased a parcel of almost 15 acres of Coombe Hill land in 1900. He promised to cut out the article and send it to her, so she would ‘understand what an underdeveloped Paradise we have quite close – only we hope it will remain underdeveloped’.11
Her father’s wish that Standen’s idyllic location should remain untouched resonated with Helen for the rest of her life. When it came to her final years, she bequeathed the house and estate to the National Trust in 1972 so that it could be preserved for the nation and hopefully would remain ‘underdeveloped’ just as her father, James Beale, had originally wished.
About The Author: Anne Stutchbury
Dr. Anne Stutchbury is an art historian whose work centers on the social and cultural dimensions of domestic life during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She earned her PhD from the University of Sussex in July 2016 with a thesis titled ‘At home’ in Standen: A study of the Beale family’s lived experience of their late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts home, 1890-1914. Following her doctoral work, Dr. Stutchbury gained practical experience as a curatorial intern at Charleston Farmhouse and served as a curator for the Crawley Museums Society in 2018.
Currently, she works as an independent researcher and consultant, contributing to ongoing projects at Standen, National Trust, while further developing her research on the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts period for her forthcoming publication, Standen: An Arts and Crafts home. Her scholarly interests include the lived experience and social and cultural perspectives of domestic interiors during the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, alongside a focus on gender studies and the work of women artists such as Mary Sargant Florence, Ethel Walker, and Vanessa Bell.
Order your copy of Standen: Philip Webb, Morris & Co. and the Creation of an Arts and Crafts Home by Anne Stutchbury, Stephen Ponder, Alice Strickland, Tessa Wild at the following online retailers:
Yale: https://yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300265941/standen/
Waterstones: https://www.waterstones.com/book/standen/anne-stutchbury/stephen-ponder/9780300265941
Blackwells: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9780300265941
Amazon UK: https://amzn.eu/d/87zCqxe
Amazon.com: https://a.co/d/bYrc49M
References
1Bibliographic details: Hardcover, £35; July 2025; 9780300265941; 272 pages: 270 x 216mm; 296 colour and b/w illustrations; Art and Architecture
2James Beale, letter to Helen Beale, 1 March 1903, pp. 1–2, NTS archive
3Morris, William, ‘How I became a socialist’, Justice, June 161894 https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1894/hibs/hibs.htm
4A weekly newspaper of the Social Democratic Federation that was founded in January 1884
51891 census
6W H Sainsbury Gilbert, ‘Saint Hill Sale Particulars’, 7 July 1876, NTS archive
7James Beale, letter to Helen, 13 April 1890, 2, NTS archive
8James Beale, letter to Helen, 29 March 1891, 3, NTS archive
9Margaret Beale, ‘Garden Diary, 1890–1932’, 1890, 1, MS 116, WSRO
10Philip Webb, Account Book 1889–98, 50, RIBA, PWA, AAD/2014/5/2/11
11James Beale, letter to Helen Beale, 1 March 1903, NTS archive