Father of Suburbia

"Have nothing in your houses," Morris famously said, "that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." The Red House is an attempt to live this principle.

It combines ornate paintings with deliberate plainness and practicality. The practical elements, such as hinges or the wooden structure of a stair, or beams and arches, are emphasised.

The red brick that gives the house its name is not plastered over, as it would have been in more conventional architecture of the time.

It proclaims love of nature and virtue: it was planned to avoid cutting down trees wherever possible, while instructive Latin sayings are written into its fabric, inscribed above a fireplace, for example, as though the house were a big, highminded fortune cookie.

It is informal in its layout, with windows dotted about its walls wherever they give the best light to the interior, and not regimented into starchy symmetry. The best aspects of the house are given to corridors and stairs, and to the kitchen, rather than formal rooms.

Its inspirations are the mediaeval houses, farm buildings and oast houses of rural Kent. The Red House was not the first of its time to take this relaxed approach, but it is still a dramatic contrast with the usual run of high-Victorian pomp.

Its fame has also been given impetus by Morris's forceful personality. The building is the most tangible physical expression of the big, bearded man's ideals, and partly for this reason 20th-century art historians hailed it as the precursor of modern architecture.

Choosing to overlook its gaudy paintings, they saw in its simple, undecorated exterior the same spirit as in the spare steel buildings of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.

So the Red House is prodigious in its progeny, even if most of Morris's dreams never came true. He imagined a world where everyone would live surrounded by well-made handicrafts and natural beauty, but it has not happened.

He is most remembered now for those wallpaper patterns, rather than a profound transformation of society. His own idyll also faded and when his marriage went awry he sold the Red House. He could never bear to go back to the place that Rossetti called "more a poem than a house" and Burne Jones "the beautifullest place on earth".

But the Red House's most enduring legacy can be found lapping at its gates, in the suburban semis of Bexleyheath. The Red House pioneered the modern suburban ideal, the idea of experiencing the pleasures of countryside within easy reach of the metropolis.

Both the house and Morris's writings inspired the Garden City movement, which in turn inspired interwar suburbia. Even the architecture of the typical semi-detached house, with its bay windows and Tudor and mediaeval allusions, owes something to the Red House.

Bexleyheath does not have Morris's socialist politics: the former Tory prime minister Edward Heath was the MP hereabouts for many years. Morris would no doubt bemoan the somewhat diminished craftsmanship of the stylistic descendants of Webb's designs.

But if Morris wanted the masses to experience the informal principles of English domestic architecture, with greenery and fresh air, this particular version of utopia can be found all over London's outer suburbs.

Visits to the Red House are by pre-booked guided tour only. Call the National Trust on 01494 755588.