Even the Castellated mode, although used mostly for rather large houses (Plate [49]), encouraged loose asymmetrical massing of the sort that is still more characteristic of the towered Italian Villa.

The Picturesque was thoroughly eclectic, in both possible senses of the word, as well as occasionally original. On the one hand, the point of view encouraged the parallel use of diverse modes. In theory, these were to be chosen according to their suitability to various sorts of natural settings, but in practice several were often employed side by side, as in Nash’s Park Villages in London, begun in 1827, and in the contemporary and later development of comparable suburban areas both in England and in America. On the other hand, the combination in one design of features derived from several different modes was allowable, even praiseworthy—low-pitched roofs with very broad eaves borrowed from the Swiss Chalet, towers from both the Castellated Mansion and the Italian Villa, bay-windows from the Tudor Parsonage, and verandas from the Indian were all part of a common repertory exploited rather indiscriminately. Basic to the Picturesque point of view and often determinant of choice of mode and even of individual features was the preoccupation with the natural setting; verandas, loggias, bay-windows and prospect towers were desirable, even necessary, features because they made possible the fuller enjoyment of the circumambient scene.

Figure 21. T. F. Hunt: house-plan
(from Designs for Parsonage Houses, 1827)

All these features affected house-plans in detail; but domestic planning in general was not as consistently re-organized as might have been expected, if only because the Picturesque point of view was so predominantly visual rather than practical in its usual concerns. Asymmetrical massing allowed, even forced, asymmetrical planning, however, thereby encouraging functional differentiation of the disposition and the sizes of various rooms (Figure [21]). Yet very often, behind irregular exteriors, the plans were only slightly dislocated from the formal patterns of the preceding Palladian period. Although the increased articulation of most house-plans allowed the introduction of windows on several sides of many rooms, more significant at this stage was the frequent use of irregular shapes for the larger rooms, their main rectangular spaces complicated by external oriels and by internal ingle-nooks. None of these individual changes can be very precisely dated, at least in the current state of knowledge of the development of the house-plan in this period. Almost all of them were generally familiar in England by 1810. Tudor Parsonages, whether or not occupied by members of the clergy, were likely to be most adeptly planned.[[324]] In them the well-defined needs of a family of relatively high social status but low income encouraged a more efficient grouping of the rooms and a clearer distinction of separate functions—entrance hall, drawing-room, dining-room, study, kitchen, scullery—than had been common earlier in such medium-sized dwellings.

In the first third of the century the various Picturesque modes of house-design were very widely exploited in England for middle-class habitations in the new suburbs, having generally made their first appearance a decade or so earlier in lodges or other accessories to large private estates. They were also popular at the new seaside resorts, such as Sidmouth in Devon and Bournemouth in Hampshire, where they often housed more exalted clients. At Sidmouth, for example, what is now the Woodlands Hotel was remodelled from a barn into a barge-boarded Cottage Orné by Lord Gwydyr in 1815; the nucleus of the Knowles Hotel there was Lord Despenser’s cottage of a few years earlier; and the Royal Glen Hotel, a modest Castellated house then known as Walbrook Cottage, was built early enough to house Queen Victoria as a baby. Although the prestige of the Picturesque declined rapidly in high aesthetic circles after 1840, the rigorous principles of Pugin and the ecclesiologists had little effect on the operations of suburban builders, who continued for decades to follow the various well-established modes of a generation earlier.

As Latrobe’s ‘Gothick’ Sedgley, built outside Philadelphia in 1798, and various other Neo-Gothic structures in Philadelphia and Boston of the first decade of the new century make evident, the Picturesque came early to the United States. Yet it was hardly before the thirties that the various Cottage and Villa modes began to compete at all with the Greek temple and the formal post-Palladian house modernized by the use of Grecian detail; only with the appearance in 1842 of Cottage Residences by A. J. Downing (1815-52)[[325]] were they enthusiastically propagated.

Earlier, new developments in the planning of the ubiquitous moderate-sized free-standing houses were not very notable in America. In the 1790s the influence of Adam, and possibly of the French, encouraged some experimentation with variously shaped rooms; but this largely died out as the necessary rectangularity of the Greek temple house, only extended by one or more wings in the largest examples, reimposed the formal Anglo-Palladian plan with central stair-hall and four nearly equal-sized corner rooms. For smaller houses with pedimented fronts, however, a sort of terrace-house plan was increasingly popular, with stair-hall at one side, two principal living rooms one behind the other, and a narrower kitchen wing extending to the rear. A planning innovation that first appeared in America in the 1790s, by no means unknown earlier in England but rare except in terrace-houses, was the opening together of two rooms—front and back parlours—by means of broad sliding doors. This became increasingly common after 1800. Moreover, the temple portico provided the equivalent of a shallow veranda across the front of the house and was sometimes replaced or supplemented by a deeper colonnaded porch at the sides or rear. The veranda, indeed, had reached the southern states fairly early in the eighteenth century, arriving from the East via the West Indies. In its usual two-storeyed form it was easily merged with the monumental colonnades demanded by the Grecian mode (Plate [38B]).

Thus, even before a rather belated wave of strong Picturesque influence began to drive out the temple house in the forties, early nineteenth-century American houses had certain definitely post-Colonial characteristics in their plans. Of later house-planning in the United States in the forties and fifties almost everything that has been said about English planning in the preceding decades applies (Figure [22]). By this time in England, however, newer planning ideas were being introduced by leading architects in relatively large houses. At Scarisbrick, for example, where the remodelling and extension of the existing Georgian house began in 1837, Pugin revived the medieval great hall (see Chapter 6). A few years later in his own house, The Grange of 1841-3 at Ramsgate,[[326]] by no means a mansion in size or scale, the more modest two-storey hall incorporates the staircase and also provides, with the galleries above, the central core of communication. Parallel with these examples, which were of Gothic inspiration, Barry at Highclere adapted the glass-roofed central cortile of the Reform Club to domestic use, associating with it the main staircase rising in a contiguous vertical space.

At the hands of High Church architects the parsonage, by definition no mansion but a modest free-standing gentleman’s residence, was also undergoing a characteristic development. No longer Tudor, of course, it was still not forced to be archaeologically decorated in its planning, since there were few if any relevant medieval models to imitate. The doctrine of ‘realism’ condemned the shabby construction and careless use of materials that had too often been characteristic of Picturesque house-building in the previous decades, while the need for economy discouraged the ornamentation common on contemporary churches.