Mackmurdo was a progress Architect, designer of furniture, textiles, metalwork and a social reformer. He was involved with the Arts for Schools Association.
He was born in London in the town of Edmonton. He was born in 1851 and lived to be 91.
He was well known for: Furniture Textiles
In 1874 he opened his own architectural practice at 28 Southampton Street, in central London.
Chair designed by Mackmurdo, the back panel of which has been seen as a pre of Art Nouveau design.
In 1882, Mackmurdo founded the Century Guild of Artists. Other members included Selwyn Image, Herbert Horne, Clement Heaton and Ruskins protegee, the sculptor Benjamin Creswick. It was one of the more successful craft guilds of its time. It offered complete furnishing of homes and buildings, and its artists were encouraged to participate in production as well as design Mackmurdo himself mastered several crafts, including metalworking and cabinet making.
In 1884, the guild showed a display in the form of a music room at the Health Exhibition in London the stand was shown, with variations, at subsequent exhibitions in Manchester and Liverpool. It incorporated two of Mackmurdos favourite motifs. One was foliage twisted into sinuous curves. Nikolaus Pevsner described Mackmurdos use of such foliage on the title page of the designers own Wrens City Churches (1883) as the first work of art nouveau which can be traced, identifying its main influences as Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and ultimately, through them, William Blake.
The second motif was the use of thin square columns, topped with flat squares instead of capitals. These columns influenced the furniture designs of C.F.A. Voysey, and, through him, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Mackmurdo used them architecturally on his own house at 8 Private Road, Enfield (1887), and on a house for the artist Mortimer Menpes, at 25 Cadogan Gardens, Chelsea (1893–94), where he incorporated them into a kind of Queen Anne style.