OF ARCHITECTURAL ILLUSTRATION.
| Vol. I. | DECEMBER, 1895. | No. 12. |
ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSES.
OLD HOUSE NEAR WARWICK. SKETCH BY WILSON EYRE, Jr.
From The Architectural Review, Vol. IV, No. 1.
Mr Wilson Eyre, Jr., in an article in The Architectural Review for January, which has been alluded to in our issue for October, and from which we have borrowed the three charming illustrations reproduced from his drawings, speaks as follows of English domestic architecture:
“There is much to be seen from the railroad in the way of long rambling farmhouses and country houses of the modest kind, and there is much to be gained by studying these for use in our own domestic architecture; their average work is so much less pretentious, so much more homelike than ours; their surroundings are studied so carefully, the garden forming as much part of the house as the roof, and great pains being taken that the garden wall, hedges, terraces, the little tea houses, in fact all the immediate surroundings, should form a harmonious effect. Photographs and measured drawings of the well-known and monumental buildings are at hand whenever we need them, but no idea can be gained, except from personal study, of the completeness and fitness of the country houses and farmhouses and of their surroundings, their “flocks of gables,” the grouping and
composition which through the most careful study arrive at the entirely unstudied and almost haphazard effect, and above all the impression produced that the building belongs to the spot upon which it is built and to no other. This is what makes the English domestic work better, to my mind, than any I have seen, and so well worthy of study, especially by our American architects.”
