Mr Ware gives a plan and elevation of his design (Fig. 158), but with the wings rather more distant from the house than he at first suggested. The left-hand block contains the kitchens, the right-hand the stables. Of the six ground-floor windows in the outlying blocks, the exigencies of internal arrangement require that four should be shams, although they are in the forefront of his architectural composition; and it is probable that some of the upper windows followed suit. The route from the kitchen to the dining-room lies across a lobby, a room, and 50 ft. of open arcade before it arrives at the outer wall of the central house wherein the dining-room is situated. When these and other inconveniences are borne in mind, it is manifest that such principles of design could have no lasting vitality.
159. Plan and Elevation of a House.
From Kent’s “Designs of Inigo Jones.”
Mr Ware, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, was only following in the footsteps of his eminent guides of thirty years earlier. Whether we look at the house designs of Inigo Jones through the eyes of Kent in 1727, or those of Gibbs through his own eyes in 1728, we find formal arrangements aiming at, and often achieving stateliness, but at much sacrifice of household comfort. Kent’s “Designs of Inigo Jones,” many of which probably owe their special characteristics as much to himself as to the great master, consist of a series of plates giving plans and elevations; an explanatory “Table” precedes them. The elucidatory matter is confined to a few lines, such as those to plate 15 of vol. ii. (Fig. 159). “The Plan of the first Story with the Elevation of the principal Front of a House, with an Arcade, standing on a Terras, about which is a Ballustrade. The Rooms of the Plan are 18 Feet high; those above ’em are 16 Feet high, except the Middle Room which comes over the Arcade to the Front, and includes the Attic Story. The Windows of the Attic Story are in the Frieze of the Entablature that encompasses the Building.” There are three points to be remarked here. First, the importance attached to the heights of the rooms. Secondly, that the “middle room” includes the attic storey; it became fashionable (at any rate in published plans) to have one large and lofty room, sometimes as much as 40 ft. high. Thirdly, that the windows of the attic storey are in the frieze of the entablature: this would allow a width of 3 or 4 ft., by a height which could only be measured in inches, for the windows of rooms of considerable area—a complete sacrifice of internal comfort for the sake of external effect. But no doubt, as such rooms were only “lodgings for servants,” they were considered good enough. Kent explains on another plate that the lodging rooms for servants “receive their light from the hall, whose top rises in a pavilion above the roof.”
160. Plan, Elevation, and Section of a House.
From Gibbs’s “Book of Architecture,” 1728.
Kent gives this as one of Inigo Jones’s own designs; it may be in reality Jones revised by Kent; but in any case the master’s reputation rests on surer ground. The illustration is offered not as a specimen of Inigo Jones’s work, but of what the early eighteenth century regarded as a suitable and elegant piece of domestic architecture. The attic storey, here starved of light, was a considerable trouble to designers. Its space was necessary in order to get sufficient accommodation, partly owing to the fact of the great room occupying two floors; and much ingenuity was brought to bear upon the problem of lighting it without overloading the elevation with windows. One method was this of squeezing them into the frieze. Another was to light it from the roof where hidden from observation. Another was to borrow light from the upper part of the central lofty room. This device is adopted in connection with the passages of Gibbs’s design in Fig. 160, which also gives a good idea of the manner in which the central hall was treated.
Such lofty rooms as this hall, lighted from windows at their summit, and warmed (if they ever got warm) by a single fire, must have been much more magnificent than comfortable. In large houses vast rooms had their uses; they could be opened on state occasions and left for more homely apartments in the intervals; but both in Kent’s book and in Gibbs’s they occur in houses of moderate size, and could hardly have been left out of account in daily life. They go to show what importance was attached to state and dignity by every “person of quality.”