Who Was C.F.A. Voysey?
“No detail is too small, or too insignificant to be worthy of our efforts to make it beautiful”
C. F. A. Voysey, Individuality, 1915
Whether it’s drawing the curves of a bird’s wing, or the undulations of a factory parapet, C. F. A. Voysey (1857–1941), the preeminent English architect, furniture, textile and wallpaper designer, felt both a moral and spiritual obligation to creating beautiful design.
Known perhaps best for his designs of birds and botanicals - Voysey was a designer who was both charming and concise; he could create so much character in a single bird with just a few strokes of a line. Whether it be a jaunty grasshopper or a serrated hemlock leaf - he was able to create such evocative characters and yet still create this concise harmony of rhythm, repetition, and colour.
Working around the later years of the Victorian era in Britain, Voysey became a leading figure of the Arts & Crafts movement. He was first and foremost an architect, influenced by the likes of A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin, and the Gothic Revival. But it wasn’t until when he had his own architecture firm established, that another English architect and designer, A. H. Mackmurdo, encouraged him to also design wallpapers and textiles. This was at a time when the Arts & Crafts movement was well underway in London, challenging the hierarchy of decorative arts being below architecture, suggesting that both disciplines were on an equal footing.
Voysey sent his wallpaper and textile designs to some 30 manufacturers, most notably Jeffrey & Co. and Essex & Co., where his stylisation of birds, hearts, and trees became distinctively his own and evermore popular. Sanderson later brought both manufacturers into the fold in 1920 and 1923 respectively, and Morris & Co.,in 1940. Many of his designs are now cared for on the archive floor of Morris & Co.’s home: Voysey House in Chiswick, West London.
There is a wonderful circularity as the designs are now housed here, since it is where Voysey had his most significant commission from Sanderson: Voysey House - or, as it was known then, ‘The White Building’, because of its distinctive white-glazed bricks of its façade. The building was constructed c.1902 as an extension to a pre-existing Sanderson factory opposite.
Voysey designed the extension with fastidious exactness: 100 x 50ft, which, he calculated, is the perfect number to accommodate the production of a 33ft piece of wallpaper laid out on printing benches. There was room for block cutting, hand grounding, stencilling and roller printing in spaces flooded with natural light, all neatly connected with a green footbridge that ran between the two buildings.
In 1928, however, a fire had taken hold of the Sanderson factory (Voysey House was left intact); this meant Sanderson left Chiswick for Perivale. All these years later, we’ve moved back into our ancestral home, Voysey House, restoring the factory to its intended function of caring for and creating beautiful design.
