If we leave the architecture of the masters and of their books, and turn to the ordinary houses of the time, we find something much more home-like and convenient. These smaller houses reflect, though dimly, the stately handling of their more pompous contemporaries. They are generally a complete and symmetrical whole, and if in the course of time their owners wish to enlarge them, it becomes a problem of some difficulty how to do so without spoiling their appearance. The entrance door is in the middle of one front, and is flanked on either hand by three or four sash windows, spaced so as to fall into groups. The group over the door is often surmounted by a pediment, or has some special treatment, as at Rothwell manor house (Fig. 192). The angles of the building generally have quoins, the roof is hipped every way, and at the eaves there is a projecting cornice of varying degrees of richness. The chimneys are gathered together in large solid stacks; the roof surface is broken by dormers. The whole effect is simple and quiet. The large spaces of plain walling, the large area of the window openings, the large chimney-stacks are all in complete contrast to the lively windows, steep gables, and detached chimney-shafts of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses. There are innumerable examples of this kind throughout the country. Every old-fashioned town has two or three, occupied by leading inhabitants, the doctor, the solicitor, the maiden ladies. Not a few manor houses are of the same type, with rooms of reasonable size and height, and the eating-room within easy reach of the kitchen. A good specimen of a small house is Fenton House, Hampstead, of which the plan is given in Fig. 168, and the side elevation in Fig. 169. The plan is compact and well arranged, there is no attempt at grandeur, and the rooms are accordingly disposed with a view primarily to comfort; yet both within and without the effect is handsome; there is nothing pretentious on the one hand, nor mean and makeshift on the other. The elevation follows the usual simple lines mentioned above.
168. Fenton House, Hampstead.
Ground Plan.
It is seldom that these houses are dated, and they have not been considered of sufficient importance for any one to record the year of their building; it is therefore not possible to place the examples here illustrated in chronological order, except in the case of the house at Burwash in Sussex (Fig. 170), which bears the date 1699 in a plaster panel on the soffit of the hood over the front door. Two features which agree with the date, and place it earlier than the other examples, are the wood mullioned windows and the panelled chimneys. The next three illustrations (Figs. 171, 172, 173) were probably all built during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. They have sash windows of which the wood casing forms a broad white margin to the opening. One has architraves to its windows, one merely key-stones by way of ornament, and one has no relief of this kind. Varieties such as these, unpretending as they are, impart a certain amount of character. The remaining two examples (Figs. 174, 175) date from towards the end of the century. They show how formal and spiritless house design was growing. The absence of a wide overhanging cornice seems to deprive them of half their character. On the other hand, they are too simple and unpretentious to excite that active dislike which some of the more laboured houses of yet later times arouses.
169. Fenton House, Hampstead.
Side Elevation.
170. “Roppynden,” Burwash, Sussex (1699).