great advantage of position, and economy was an object; but in its refinement of detail and perfection it is as characteristic as his greater works. In the interior there was one remarkable feature involving some bold and even hazardous construction. The confined space made it necessary to erect the great Lecture Theatre on the top story; and this, considering its size and the large number it was to accommodate, was a matter of no slight difficulty, but it was successfully achieved.
The New Wing at Trentham also belongs to about the same period. The annexed woodcut shows its general character—a Palazzino in itself, with an engaged order, not altogether unlike his favourite Banqueting-house at Whitehall. It needs no more special notice.
Bridgewater House.—The building which most distinctly marks his “second manner” is Bridgewater House. The change is chiefly traceable in a tendency to greater freedom of treatment, and to a desire for greater richness of effect. It seems to have been partly due to a general change of architectural taste in these directions, partly to his own habituation to Gothic work at the New Palace of Westminster.
Bridgewater House (built for the Earl of Ellesmere in 1847) was the last of his great Italian buildings in London. In his first design, fearing apparently too great a similarity to his Club-houses, and inclining to a more ornate style, he attempted to depart from his usual principles, and produced a design (exhibited at the Royal Academy) in which on a lofty basement appeared a grand Corinthian order with engaged columns and entablature unbroken. But, as usual in such cases, he could not rest content with this dereliction from the principles in which both study and experience had confirmed him. He could not make up his mind to a “walled-up colonnade,” and double stories masked by a single order.[46] The design was rejected as too costly; and he not unwillingly returned to his usual style, and produced the design now executed.
In it there was, as has been said, another conflict of principles in his mind. Profuse Gothic ornamentation had made his earlier Italian simplicity seem insipid; for a time his pencil was busy, covering every yard of plain surface with panelling and sculpture. But here also his old principles reasserted their dominion, and the design ultimately came out as we at present see it, more ornate than his former works, but yet preserving a general character of simplicity.
The street front remained uniform as in his Club-houses; in the Park front internal requirements forced upon him the very effective variety of the great three-light windows at each end of the façade. The porch he was obliged to add for convenience sake, but, as it were, under protest, for it seemed to him, as usual, an excrescence. The chief peculiarity in the design was the treatment of the upper
windows. He was obliged to make them small and place them close under the cornice, and accordingly he united them by panels, and treated them as a kind of frieze. But this also he did not in the abstract approve; he doubted whether they were not too small for a story, yet too large for a frieze, and whether the effect was not to diminish the apparent height of the building. Another unusual step was the concealment of the roofs, and the substitution of a balustrade. It is curious that, whereas in his earlier designs (e.g. the Travellers’, Walton, and the Reform Club) he had used a visible roof, yet in some later designs (e.g. Bridgewater House and Cliefden) he departed from this principle, and employed a balustrade. The two are of course not incompatible, and indeed, especially if the roof be high pitched, some protection of balustrade or parapet is needed in London streets to prevent masses of snow, slates, &c., from falling. In his great design for the Government Offices, Sir Charles showed in almost all cases both a visible roof and a balustrade, and accordingly, in the design for the Halifax Town-hall, carried out since his death by his son, a similar arrangement is adopted.
The annexed woodcuts give the elevation of the Park front, and the plan of the principal floor. The latter manifests the same characteristics already noticed in the Reform Club. It is quoted by Mr. Kerr, in his ‘English Gentleman’s House,’ as a typical specimen of a stately and symmetrical plan, and contrasted with one in which a convenient irregularity and picturesque effect are the main objects proposed.