HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE AND LIVE IN IT.
No. II.
We spent last Sunday at Figgins’s at Brixton, No. 2, Albert Terrace, Woodbine Lane. A hearty fellow: good glass of port: prime cigar: snug box in the garden: and a bus every five minutes at the end of the road: a regular A.1. place for a Sunday out, and home again in an hour and a half to our paradise at ——; but we are not going to give you our address, or we should be pestered to death with your visits. Suffice it to say that Figgins’s is a good specimen of a citizen’s villa near London. Now, there are several kinds of villas: there is the villa near London, and the villa not near: there is the villa in a row, and the detached villa: there is your lodge, and your park, and your grange, and your cottage ornée; and best of all, in our opinion, there is—what is neither the one nor the other of all these—there is the plain old-fashioned country-house:—once a cottage, then a farm, then a gentleman’s house: irregular, odd, picturesque, unpretending, comfortable, and convenient. But Figgins’s is a new slap-up kind of affair; built within the last two years, and uniting in itself all the last improvements and the most recent elegancies. He has settled himself in a neighbourhood quite the genteelest of that genteel district: for, though merchants and men of yesterday, so to speak, the people of Albert Terrace show that they have respect for the good times of yore, and they admire the character of the fine old English gentleman: they pride themselves, moreover, on being a steady set of people, and they show their respect for things ancient even in the outward arrangements of their dwellings. Thus you enter each of the twenty little gardens surrounding each of the twenty little detached houses, through gates with Norman pillars at their sides, that would have done honour to Durham or Canterbury; while the wooden barriers themselves are none of your radical innovations on the Greek style, nor any of your old impious fox-hunting five-bars, but beautiful pieces of fretwork, copied from the stalls of Exeter Cathedral, painted so nicely in oak, and so well varnished, that Stump the painter must have out-stumped himself in their execution. Once within the gate, however, and the connecting wall—capped, we ought to have said, with a delicious Elizabethan cornice—all Gothic formality ends for the while; and you are lost in astonishment at the serpentine meanderings, the flowing lines, and the thousand attractions of the garden. An ill-natured friend, who went with us, took objection at the weeping ash, in the middle of the circular grass-plot in front of the door; but he altered his mind in the evening, when he found the chairs ranged under its sociable branches—and the Havannahs and sherry-coblers crowding the little table made to fit round the central stem. ’Twas a wrinkle that which he was not up to:—he was a Goth—a cockney. Figgins, though a Londoner, knows what’s what, in matters of that kind; and shows his good taste in such a practical combination of the utile with the dulce. On either side of the house, the pathways ran off with the most mysterious windings among the rhododendrons and lilac bushes, and promised a glimpse of better things in the garden behind, when we should have passed through our host’s atrium, aula, porticus, and viridarium. Figgins’s house has its main body, or corps de logis, composed of two little bits of wings, and a wee little retiring centre—the former have their gables capped with the most elaborate “barge-boards,” as the architects term them, all fretwork and filigree, and swell out below into bay windows, with battlements at top big enough for Westminster Abbey. The centre has a narrow and exceedingly Gothic doorway, and one tiny bit of a window over it, through which no respectably-sized mortal has any chance of getting his head: and again over this is a goodly shield, large enough to contain the blazoned arms of all the Figginses. The builder has evidently gone upon the plan of making the most of his design in a small compass; but he has committed the absurdity first of allowing subsidiary parts to become principals, and then of making the ornaments more important than the spaces: thus the centre is squeezed to death like a nut in a pair of crackers, and battlements, boards, and shield “engross us whole,” by the obtrusiveness of their size and workmanship. Nevertheless, this façade, such as it is, struck us as beating Johnson’s house, in Paragon Place, all to nothing: there was something like the trace of an idea in it, there was an aim, or a pretension, at something: whereas the other is really nothing at all, and its appearance indicates absolute vacuity in the central cerebral regions of its inventor. Figgins has two good rooms on the ground floor, a lobby and staircase between them, to keep the peace between their occupants, three good bed-rooms on his first, and four very small ones up amongst his gables: add to which, that he boasts of what he calls his future dressing-room, but what his wife says is to be her boudoir—we forget where—but somewhere up the stairs. All this again is much better than the Paragon Place plan—it shows that men recover somewhat of their natural good sense when they get into country air.
Figgins has not got a great deal of room in his villa, it is true; but he and his nineteen neighbours are all suitably lodged; and when they all go up to the Bank every morning in the same omnibus, can congratulate themselves on emerging each from his own undivided territory; or when they all come down again in the afternoon, each in a different vehicle—(you never meet the same faces in the afternoon that you do in the morning trip: we know not why, but so it is, and the fact should be signalized to the Statistical Society)—they can each perambulate their own eighth of an acre with their hands under their coat-tails in solemn dignity; or their wife, while awaiting their arrival, and listening to the beef-steaks giving an extra fiz, wanders round and round again, or, like a Virgil’s crow,
“Secum sola magnâ spatiatur arenâ.”
If Figgins had but insisted on having the back of his residence plastered and painted to look more natural than stone, the same as the front—or, better still, if his ambition could have contented itself with the plain unsophisticated original brick, we should say nothing against his taste—’tis peculiar certainly, but he’s better off than Johnson.
On the opposite side of Woodbine Lane, some wretch of a builder is going to cut off the view of the Albert Terrace people all over the narrow field, as far as the brick kilns, by erecting a row of contiguous dwellings some three or four storeys high, besides garrets, and they are to be in the last Attic style imported. One word is enough for them: the man who knowingly and voluntarily goes out of town to live in a house in a row, like those lines of things in the Clapham Road or at Hammersmith, deserves to be sent with his house to “eternal smash;” he is an animal below the range of æsthetics, and is not worth remonstrating with.
One of these next days, when we take our hebdomadal excursion, we intend going to see old Lady de Courtain at Lowlands Abbey, near ——; you can get to it in about twenty minutes by the Great Western. It is no abbey in reality, you know; there never was any Foundation on the spot further than what Sam Curtain, when he was an upholsterer in Finsbury, and before he got knighted, had laid down in the swampy meadow which he purchased, and thus bequeathed to his widow: but it’s all the same; it looks like an abbey;—that is to say, there are plenty of turrets, and the windows have all labels over their heads, and there are two Gothic conservatories, and two Gothic lodges at each of the two Gothic gates; and there is a sham ruin at the end of the “Lake:” and if this is not as good as a real abbey, we should like to know what is. Old Lady de Courtain was perfectly justified in Normanizing her name and her house:—why should she not? she had plenty of money: had she been a man, she could have bought a seat for half a dozen boroughs, and might even have gone a step higher; but, as it is, she has married her eldest daughter to the eldest son of Sir Thomas Humbug, a new Whig baronet; and she calls her house as she pleases. We applaud the old lady’s spirit; she has two other daughters still on the stocks, and she gives good dinners; we shall certainly go and patronize her. Comfort for comfort, we are not quite sure but that we had rather take up our quarters with John Bold, Esq., at Hazel House, on the top of the hill opposite. It is quite a different-looking mansion, and yet the rooms are laid out nearly on the same plan: in the one all is Gothic, in the other all is classic: one is be-fretted, and be-pinnacled, and be-shafted, and be-buttressed; but the other has a good plain Tuscan portico, like St Paul’s in Covent-Garden—plain windows wide and high, at enormous distances from each other—sober chimney-pots, that look as if they were really meant to be smoked, and not a single gimcrack or fanciful device any where about the building. It’s only a brick house plastered, after all; but it has a certain air of ease and comfort and respectability about it, that corresponds to a nicety with the character of its worthy inmate. If the door were wide enough, you might turn a coach and pair in the dining-room; there is a good, wide, low-stepped staircase; you may come down it four-a-breast, and four steps at a time, if you like—and if it were well behaved so to do, but it isn’t; and your bedroom would make two of Figgins’s drawing-rooms, lobby and all. The house always looks to us as if it would last longer than Lady de Courtain’s; and so we think it will; just as we doubt not but that honest John Bold’s dirty acres will be all in their proper places when Lady de C.’s three per cents shall be down at forty-two again, and her houses in the city shall be left empty by their bankrupt tenants. They live, too, in a very different way, and in widely distinct circles: at the Abbey you meet many an ex-civic notoriety, and many a rising hope of Lombard Street: it is a perpetual succession of dinners, dances, and picnics: at the House you are sure to be introduced to some sober-faced, top-booted, elderly gentleman or other, and to one or two rotund black-skirted individuals; and you find a good horse at your service every morning, or the keeper is ready for you in proper time and season; and sometimes the county member calls in, or a quorum of neighbouring magistrates sit there in solemn conclave. One is the house of to-day, the other of yesterday: one keeps up the reminiscences of the town, and of a peculiar part of the town, rather too strongly; the other actually smells of the country, and, though so near the metropolis, has nothing with it in common. Their owners, when they go to town, live, one in the Regent Park, the other in Park Lane.
Another acquaintance of ours—and this we will say that we are proud of being known to him—dwells in an old-fashioned gloomy house at Petersham. It is a respectable old gentleman in a brown coat, black shorts, white waistcoat, and a pigtail; and is a member of the Royal Society as well as of the Society of Antiquarians. The house in question suits him, and he suits the house; it was built in the time of that impudent intriguing Dutchman who came over here and drove out his uncle and beau-père; and it accordingly possesses all the heavy dignity of the Dutch houses of that period. The windows are pedimented and cased with mouldings; they are lofty and sufficiently numerous; the doorway has two cherubs flying, with cabbages and roses round the shell that hangs over it; and the lawns are still cut square, and have queer-shaped beds and parterres. There is something dignified and solemn in the very bricks of the mansion, wearing as they do a more regular and sombre hue of red than the dusty-looking things of the present day; and when you once get into the spacious rooms, all floored and pannelled with oak, you feel a glow of veneration for olden times—though not for those times—that you cannot define, but which is nevertheless excessively pleasing. While sitting in the well-stored library of this mansion, you expect to see Addison walking in at the one door, and Swift at another; and you are not quite sure but that you may have to meet Bolingbroke at dinner, and take a glass of wine with Prior or Pope. There are numberless large cupboards all over the place; you could sit inside any of the fireplaces, if the modern grates were, as we wish them, removed: and as for opening or slamming a door in a hurry, it is not to be done; they are too heavy; no such impertinences can ever be tolerated in such a residence. And then our friend himself—we could tell you such a deal about him, but we are writing about houses, not men—you must go and get introduced to him yourself. Let it be put down in your pocket memoranda, whenever you hear of a house of this kind to let, either take it yourself or recommend somebody else whom you have a regard for to do so. It is not a handsome, stylish kind of house; but it is one of the right sort to live in.
Very little is to be said in blame, much in praise, of the majority of English country gentlemen’s houses; if atrocities of taste be committed any where, it is principally near the metropolis, where people are only half-and-half rural, or rather are of that rus-in-urbe kind, that is in its essence thoroughly cockney. There is every variety of mansion throughout the land, every combination of style, and more often the absence of all style at all; and in most cases the houses, at least the better kind of them, are evidently made to suit the purposes of the dweller rather than the architect. This ought to be the true rule of building for all dwellings, except in the cases of those aristocratic palaces or châteaux where the public character of the owner requires a sacrifice of private convenience to public dignity. Houses that are constructed in accordance with the requirements of those that are to live in them, and that are suited to the exigencies of their ground and situation, are sure to please longer, and to gratify the taste of a greater number of persons, than those which are the mere embodyings of an architect’s portfolio. This, however, requires that the principles of the architect should be allowed to vary from the strict proportions of the classic styles;—or rather, that he should be allowed to copy the styles of civil architecture, whether of Greece or Rome, or of ancient Europe. The fault hitherto has been, that designers of houses have taken all their ideas, models, and measurements from the religious rather than the civil buildings of antiquity; and that they have thought the capitals of the Jupiter Stator more suited to an English gentleman’s residence than the capricious yet elegant decorations of a villa at Pompeii. In the same way, until very lately, those who call themselves “Gothic Architects” have been putting into houses windows from all the cathedrals and monasteries of the country, but have seldom thought of copying the more suitable details of the many mansions and castellated houses that still exist. Better sense and better taste are now beginning to prevail, and we observe excellent houses rising around us. Of these, by far the larger proportion are in the styles of the Middle Ages; and for this reason, that the architects who practise in those styles have a wider field to range in for their models, and have also more thoroughly emancipated themselves from their former professional thraldom. There is also a very decided reaction in the public taste in favour of the arts of the Middle Ages, or rather let us say, in favour of a style of national architecture;—and as the Greek and Roman styles have little to connect them with the historical associations of an Englishman’s mind, they have fallen into comparative disfavour. For one purely classic house now erected, there are three or four Gothic. The worst of it is, however, that from the low state into which architecture had fallen by the beginning of the present century, and even for some time afterwards, there has been no sufficient space and opportunity for creating a number of good architects adequate to meet the demands of the public; and hence, the greatest barbarisms are being daily perpetrated, even with the best intentions of doing the correct thing, both on the part of the man who orders a building, and of him who builds. Architecture is a science not to be acquired in a day, nor by inspiration;—nor will the existence of one eminent man in that profession immediately cause a hundred others of the same stamp to rise up around him. On the contrary, it requires a long course of scientific study, and of actual scientific practice; it demands that a great quantity of traditionary precepts be kept up, and handed down from master to pupil through many generations of students and practitioners: it requires the accumulation of an enormous number of good instances and examples; and in most cases it is to be polished by long foreign travel. Now, all this cannot be accomplished in an impromptu, off-hand manner: the profession of architecture requires to be raised and kept up at a certain height of excellence through many long years: it is like the profession of medicine, of law, or the study of all scientific matters: when once the school of architecture declines, the practice of it declines in the same ratio, and the resuscitation of it becomes a work of considerable time. Such a regenerating of architecture is going on amongst us: comparatively more money is now laid out on buildings than at any preceding period for the last hundred years: our architects are becoming more scientific and more accomplished: the profession is occupying a higher rank than it has lately done; and we may, therefore, hope for an increasing proportion of satisfactory results. If only the public eye be cultivated and refined in a similar degree, we may reasonably expect that some beautiful and notable works will be executed.