DESIGN MOMENT In her new series, Celia Rufey reflects on the style landscape surrounding the 1919 launch of H&G

1910 – 1919

In our new series, we look at events from each decade in our 100-year history that have shaped the way we design today. This month it’s the launch of H&G in 1919

‘Everyone desires to make his home as comfortable, as tasteful and as convenient as means will allow; and it will be the endeavour of this magazine to help continuously towards that end.’ So says the mission statement in the first issue of Our Homes & Gardens, launched in 1919 by Country Life Ltd. Its directors predicted the title would have a ‘great and prosperous future’. A hundred years later, we salute their foresight.

The optimism of the years after the Great War – with its appetite for a simpler and less formal way of life – was an inspired moment to launch Homes & Gardens, the first homeinterest magazine. Those who were able to escape to the country were buying old cottages and restoring them. new housing was borrowing elements from the Arts & Crafts movement, so when the magazine’s foreword went on to tell the readers that ‘good taste, expressed in a moderate way, is far more to be desired than what is bizarre and extravagant’, it was reflecting the mood of the moment.

Homes & Gardens was a new source of practical guidance, too, on kitchen planning, labour-saving devices, interior design and advice on how to achieve a no-servant household. The surprising discovery is how many features in the first issue could be transplanted to 2019. The Charm of White Interiors would be a seamless fit, as would Modern Painted Furniture. All that is missing in Gertrude Jekyll’s Colour in the Small Garden are pictures of her heavenly borders in colour rather than black and white. If Homes & Gardens now takes colour on its pages for granted, its ambition for the future is as resolute as the first time the magazine hit the shelves.