The painted white room was born out of an episode of introversion, in an act of creative defiance. On a night in London, a British interior designer and architect named Edward William Godwin holed up in his room to ponder the purpose of beauty. He was a sensitive person, one who was often overwhelmed by how he perceived the world.
Recently he had marveled at the elegance of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, which was newly available in the shops. This porcelain often featured rich blue patterns drawn against a white background. After a long night in the privacy of his room, Godwin impulsively painted over the wallpaper that covered the ceiling with a creamy white paint.
His gesture earned praise from his bohemian cohort, which included the playwright Oscar Wilde and fellow designers William Morris and Philip Webb, who appreciated the dramatic look of his new ceiling upon visiting with him. A few years later in the Cotswolds, Morris and Webb got caught up in their own pursuit of beauty, and following Godwin’s example, they whitewashed an entire room of Morris’s country retreat. They named this space “the Paneled Room” at first, but in time, it became known as the White Room.
They fashioned the interior as a bit of a dreamscape and laboratory of design, one that aimed to be dislocated from any specifics of history or geography. There was elegance in the white room’s plainness, and it could be embraced by everyone without drawing attention to stark lines of class. Morris was a wild-haired and bearded optimist with gentle eyes.
Originally a poet, he was born in Walthamstow, and he spent his early career in London. He wrote a science fiction novel about the possibility of finding a utopia hundreds of years in the future, which was published in 1890. He believed in an egalitarian society, and his idealism made him especially attentive to the environments in which people lived, as he believed that surrounding oneself with pleasing colors and images could help people feel more connected to the natural world.
Morris is possibly best remembered today for his formative contributions to the Arts and Crafts Movement, in which he designed textile and wallpaper patterns with elaborate tangles of flora and fauna, punctuated with images of songbirds or ripened fruit. Morris’s wallpaper patterns were rich in color and brought the world out-of-doors inside. They were not affordable for all, certainly not by the poorest of persons, whose well-being motivated him.
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