"`No junk!' is the cry of the new interior-no place for anything which does not serve some definite utilitarian or decorative function." Interior designer Hazel H. Adler's 1917 plea for unfussiness was not new. Following the lead of Eastlake and William Morris in England, proponents of what was known as the Arts and Crafts movement offered the middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic an anti-consumerist philosophy with which to repudiate imitation and mass production-and the evils of degraded labor. "The art that is life" should incorporate the value of work in the design of everyday objects. Morris's American acolytes Elbert Hubbard and Gustav Stickley, among others, adopted natural styles, "honest" design, and hand craftsmanship in their household designs and furnishings.
The increased construction of bungalows by the 1920s signaled Americans' enthusiasm for the Arts and Crafts style, if not its message. Large, small, or in-between, this house form was readily adaptable to smaller families, modern suburban living, and liberated women who sought activities outside the home. Technological innovations such as indoor plumbing, central heating, and electricity replaced servants' labor and ensured family privacy-but made more work for Mother and Father. The bungalow's open design linked more closely the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen, enabling a more informal hospitality. The kitchen, once an unadorned work space separate from the main mass of the dwelling, was now integrated into the house and household. The kitchen was to be "sweet and clean," its smooth surfaces and implements of porcelain and steel celebrating the modern as much as the Arts and Crafts design of the rest of the bungalow urged its opposite.
Indeed, the very simplicity of Arts and Crafts design was easily replicable by machine. By the 1920s, furniture makers, potteries, and textile producers had successfully adapted the handmade aesthetic to mass production. National five and dime stores such as Woolworth's offered a wide range of Arts and Crafts-influenced goods. Even the bungalow was mass produced: Sears, Roebuck offered consumers a wide variety of Honorbilt homes, available through their catalogues and shipped as a kit by train to the nearest depot.