Red House
- Architecture and design enthusiasts
- Art lovers
- Families with children
What Visitors Say
Lovely guided tour around the house. The tour guides are very knowledgeable and tell you so much. The amount of rooms open to the public are not very many though. The tour is not wheelchair friendly and neither is the garden with narrow uneven paths and gravel.
Iconic William Morris House. Quiet. Fascinating history. The National Trust has done a lot of work revealing some original decor. You have to book.
William Morris’s first ever house is a must visit for all architects ans design lovers. Part of English heritage, the house is exclusively visited as part of a guided visit- the volunteer guides are very well read and prepared to answer any design related question, and on the garden there’s also a second hand bookshop. No café tho for scones as advertised on the website. Very much worth a visit if you love visiting historical homes. It’s also the first ever Arts and Crafts house (and had electricity and indoors bathrooms from the beginning).
It seems that the National Trust have forgotten about this lovely building. No Shop. No Tea Room. Parking in a local park (15 minutes walk away) is the given option on the NT app and website, but the is parking on the local streets. Only a few tickets are available and these are released two weeks in advance and are gone very quickly. Get there on time as they will start without you. The property is closed over the winter months. The guide we had was very knowledgeable but had clearly done this many, many times before and the spark was just not there. The property has a number of "patches" where experts have removed paint to see what is underneath. These gives the feeling that the house is awaiting renovation. There is very little furniture in the house considering how much Morris and Co would have produced in their time. Half the house is blocked of for 'private' use, leaving just four rooms and circulation rooms to visit. Worth a visit if you have not been before, but probably just the one visit is enough. It has been 10 years since my last visit and will wait another 10 before I come back.
Amazing house to visit if you are a Morris fan or just like architecture. Not much left of the original furniture, but what is there is worth seeing. Guides do an amazing job at immersing you into the house and life there with anecdotes. You have to book in advance to go in, but the gardens are open to everyone.
Highlights
Webb’s ‘Honest’ Architecture
Birthplace of Arts & Crafts principlesAsymmetry, local brick, deep eaves—nothing is showy; everything serves life inside the house.
Exterior and ground floor circuit
Morris & Burne-Jones Wall Paintings
Early experiments by a future design firmSketchy, lyrical figures surfaced from beneath later paint layers—studio work done at home.
Stair hall / principal rooms (guided access)
Total Design, Room by Room
Architecture, furniture and ornament as one ideaEven with losses, you can read the ‘whole house’ concept: built-in settles, purposeful light, humane scale.
Parlour, dining room, bedrooms
Garden as an Extension of the House
Nature completes the interiorFruit trees, workaday borders and sightlines turn the garden into another ‘room’.
Rear lawns, orchard paths
Opening Hours
Fun Facts
Red House was designed in 1859 by Philip Webb for his friend William Morris and is widely cited as the first true Arts & Crafts house.
Conservation work revealed Morris and Edward Burne-Jones’s early wall paintings hidden under later paint—rare survival of their ‘at-home’ experiments.
Ideas forged at Red House fed directly into Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (founded 1861), the workshop that reshaped Victorian interiors.
