A House is Not A Home

The band ART-O-MATIC teamed up with Moving Pictures Theatre to film the group performing their evocative songs based on both artists and architects, in locations that directly relate to their subject.

A House is Not a Home is the first video in the collaboration, available to watch below. The song vividly brings to life the work of the architect Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and the wider arts and crafts movement, which reacted against mass industrialisation and focused on the dignity of craftspeople and labourers to both design and make their creations.

The video was filmed inside in one of the houses designed by Baillie Scott, built in 1913 and located in Storeys Way, Cambridge. The owners of the house – Sarah Knight and family – allowed the team extensive access into their home and garden, which they decorate and keep maintained according to arts & crafts principles.

Lyrics – A House Is Not A Home

Construction is decorative
Decoration constructive
Design of a Baillie Scott house
Inside, outside open plan

A house is not a home
Unless it seems to have grown
On the site of its design
For comfort, love, sunshine

Peter Pan built for Wendy
In Never Never Land
The art lover is one who ought
To live in the house of their dreams

Chorus

Sensitively proportioned
Idea of the house as shelter
Traditional yet modern
Drawing room at Darmstadt
Kunst and kunsthandwerk
Muthesius Das Englishe Haus
Never construct a dwelling
That you wouldn’t want to live in yourself