One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 48, lino, Habitat and glazed tiles .... a century of interior design

Leaded lights and blinds, 2004

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

A century is a pretty long time when it comes to interior design and our house will have gone through the full sweep of changing fashions.

Now I don’t know what is what like during the fifty years that Joe and Mary Ann lived here but I can guess.

The walls would have had thick heavy wallpaper, the floors a mix of carpet and lino and the walls in the hall would have been covered with those embossed papers which in turn would have been painted in dark colours.

The windows contained leaded lights and each of the rooms would have had tiled fireplaces differing only in the degree of elaborate finishing touches.

Now some of this can be reconstructed from what has survived amongst the six houses that make up the block and the rest I remember from the houses I grew up in.

The dining room, 1976

There was much to be said for the design and fittings.

The carpets and heavy curtains kept down the draughts and the embossed and painted wallpaper in the hall were perfect for an area which would see a lot of people passing through.

The kitchen remained a fairly small room  but Joe and Mary seemed to have got rid of the old cast iron range fairly soon after they moved in relying instead on a state of the art gas cooker,and because Joe built the block he ensured that all of the houses were wired for electricity from the outset.

And here come the tales of vandalism because when John bought the house many of those features were ripped out and stripped and varnished floors replaced those thick carpets matched by stylish blinds.

Now I say vandalism but I was as guilty doing much the same in the houses I bought in the 70s before taking my place in this one.

We were after all part of that Habitat generation in love with clean design and wanting to banish all those late Victorian and Edwardian fiddly bits.

And on reflection we lost a lot, so that a decade later we were looking to reintroduce open fires and picture rails, examining period books for things we had thrown out.

The dining room in 2012

The supreme irony was that in south Manchester house owners were scouring the east and north of the city for period features which were coming out of properties being demolished.

It led to me reinstalling a cast iron bath and lavatory suite, along with a tiled fireplace.

We had totally ignored that simple rule that you tamper with the original design of a house at your peril and in slavishly adopting the fashionable interior design lost sight of what made the house work.

Pictures; of the interior of the house in 1977 from the collection of Lois Elsden and the house in 2012 from the collection of Andrew Simpson



*The story of house, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house