Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was, by all accounts, a difficult man. I’ve had a craving for his work since first learning about him in the early 1960s; then, seeing my first example in the summer of 1971, I was addicted. Whether Voysey’s “difficulty” was directed at employees, clients, friends or family, I don’t know. It was unlikely to have been clients because he had dozens, mostly residential.

[Hell. By most accounts, I’m a difficult man.]

In a new book on the Arts & Crafts architectural heritage of England’s Lake District, I found this wonderful quote from Voysey, his “formula” for successful domestic design:

Repose, Cheerfulness, Simplicity, Breadth, Warmth, Quietness in a storm, Economy of upkeep, Evidence of protection, Harmony with surroundings, Absence of dark passages, Evenness of temperature, and making the house a frame to its inmates. Doors wide of proportion, to suggest a welcome, not standoffishly dignified like a coffin lid.

“Inmates”? Now there’s a word that distances us from both his time and place.

Since Voysey died in 1941—at the age of eighty-four, more or less—it’s tempting to pigeonhole these remarks with other quaint notions, like literacy and penmanship and deference to elders, for example. Over the last weekend I had the misfortune to watch a Kardashian marathon and now can’t imagine a band of miscreants less worthy of Voysey’s vision than Kourtney, Khloë, Kim & Kompany. Yes, his clients were among Britain’s upper class—what “percent” I’m not prepared to calculate—but he was also fully capable of applying those criteria to smaller commissions for the middle class, or what passed for it in the years before the First World War.

Fresh from a third-year design studio, I can admit that twenty-somethings have a very difficult time with one thing that Voysey handled so well: ornament. As a product myself of the Modern Movement, ornament ought to be a “four-letter word,” so my embrace of honest ornamentation defies understanding. It was only very, very late in the semester that I began to sense what I was asking students to do: something not necessarily against their nature, but certainly beyond their architectonic experience.

Quite aside from what passes for my spirituality, soul-searching comes easily—perhaps too easily. So here are the horns of my dilemma: can I in good conscience espouse the picturesque architectural ideas of a century ago?

Which brings me to the matter of computers.

It may be that Dirk Gently has become my inspiration. His holistic detective agency based on “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” takes a big-picture view of crime and I seem to have a similar take on architectural history. So perhaps that’s why Douglas Adams’ unlovable character resonated with me. I’ve noted lately that three of my blogs—yes, there are others besides Agincourt—have begun to blur: William Halsey Wood has crossed over at least three times and now Lawrence Buck is doing the same.

Buck has designed two buildings in Agincourt, both of them houses and both from the years just prior to World War I. Don’t look for a book on Buck; I haven’t written it yet, but had better get a move on before someone else does. Having looked at a few dozen Buck buildings (most of them single-family houses), I’ve developed a feel for his style, though that may be too strong a claim. You be the judge.

The Aiden and Cordelia Archer house is a big one—3000+ square feet, which doesn’t count for much these days—on three floors. But it’s the cottage-like Rose Kavanagh house (at a little over 1000 sq. ft.) that interests me these days. Its inspiration was, in fact, Buck’s own home, a very small one built in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago shortly after he married and began a family. It’s long gone, a victim of early gentrification, probably replaced by a handsome 1920s apartment block or a 1960s ugly one. I’ve walked that street but can’t recall.

You’ve probably not encountered Lawrence Buck (1865-1929) but his dates will suggest that he was a close contemporary of you-know-who. In fact, I just ran across an on-line piece about one of Buck’s Rockford, Illinois houses that states without hesitation that Buck worked for “he who shall not be named,” which, by the way, is untrue. But his work was widely published in platforms like the House Beautiful, Ladies Home Journal, and House & Garden. You might actually might be surprised to know that he designed a house in Williston. But it was his own home that served as a model for Rose Kavanagh’s home.

Since they were both Chicagoans, it’s tempting to link Buck with Frank Lloyd Wright. Their work attracted a similar clientele (based on my own unscientific sampling and subject to revision); they even officed in Steinway Hall for a few years and undoubtedly snarled at one another in the elevator on those days when Wright came in from the Oak Park studio. In an obscure piece of correspondence with Ralph Fletcher Seymour (who published an early work of Swedish feminist Ellen Key, translated by Mamah Borthwick Cheney), Wright makes a snarky remark about Buck’s rendering skills. So I smile at the prospect of occasional interactions between them.

But you can see from these grainy reproductions from Isabel Bevier’s The House: its Plan, Decoration and Care that a Buck house was downright reticent when compared with Wrightian bravado. It seems much farer to me that his buildings be compared with British Arts & Crafts designers like Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, who may be even more obscure. But that’s a claim for another day. In the meantime, consider this simple house from about one hundred years ago on the sandy north shore of Chicago just a few block south of the Evanston line and a hundred yards from the lake. And tell me if I’ve absorbed some of its finer, more delicate, borderline gemüchtlich qualities.

Rose’s house is the one on the left. She’s standing by the kitchen door.

The Kelmscott Gallery in Chicago must have acquired much go the surviving Iannelli archives. Several items of Margaret’s were offered on eBay a couple years ago. I bought three small gouache paintings on yellow trace and gave them as Christmas gifts to a friend. This animal caravan is amazing.

It’s hard to believe that Margaret died in a mental hospital, years after he husband and other caretakers had also passed, and that her body was unclaimed and consigned to a pauper’s grave on the hospital grounds.