DOI Heft:
Division I: Great Britain
DOI Artikel:Dawber, E. Guy: On some recent british designs for country houses
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.19999#0083
BRITISH COUNTRY HOUSES
This may be due in a certain measure to the foolish bye-laws
made years ago for buildings in crowded cities and towns, and
which are totally inapplicable for country districts. In the country,
where a far greater proportion of time is spent out of doors, the
necessity for large windows is not so great, and every architect knows
it is not so much the size as the position of a window that best
lights a room.
If anyone will take the trouble to measure the windows of a
well proportioned and well lighted room in an old house, they will
be surprised to find how small the actual openings are, and how
unnecessarily big we make ours.
In a measure this is perhaps attributable to the height modern
rooms are now made. The reaction from the low and oftentimes
gloomy rooms of the 16th and 17th centuries commenced in Queen
Anne's reign to the high and lofty ones then coming into fashion ;
this feeling has lasted to the present day and has done more to spoil
the proportions of modern houses, both inside and out, than any-
thing else. Rooms above a certain height become disproportionate
as regards their width and length, and unless the windows are carried
close up to the ceiling, they cannot be well ventilated.
It is a great addition to a house, to carry one room up higher
than the others, the hall perhaps taken up two stories, or the parlour
treated as a music room with panelled walls.
Perhaps the keynote to the treatment of the inside of a house,
whether in the town or country, is summed up in those two very
hackneyed words, " breadth and simplicity." Simplicity does not
mean in any way " poverty " of treatment, but restraint and common
sense in design. A house can be fitted up with the richest and
most exquisite materials and yet be absolutely quiet and dignified.
On the other hand it can be treated with the poorest materials but
in a manner that produces an overwhelming sense of garishness and
vulgarity.
Let us think of the arrangement often seen in an ordinary
room. An enormous cornice of heavy and cumbrous shape fills up
the angle of the ceiling, a coarse picture rail with a highly coloured
frieze and a deeply moulded skirting of vulgar detail entirely mar all
sense of repose and scale. A skirting to a room is put to prevent
the legs of chairs and pieces of furniture, &c. damaging the plaster
of the walls. It need be little more than a fillet some three or
four inches deep at the most, kept as plain and unobtrusive as
possible—as in Mr. Harrison Townsend's house at Letchworth
(B 92), and Mr. Percy Worthington's dining-room at "Barrows
Green" (B 108)—and in no sense as a decorative object. Yet
xvii
This may be due in a certain measure to the foolish bye-laws
made years ago for buildings in crowded cities and towns, and
which are totally inapplicable for country districts. In the country,
where a far greater proportion of time is spent out of doors, the
necessity for large windows is not so great, and every architect knows
it is not so much the size as the position of a window that best
lights a room.
If anyone will take the trouble to measure the windows of a
well proportioned and well lighted room in an old house, they will
be surprised to find how small the actual openings are, and how
unnecessarily big we make ours.
In a measure this is perhaps attributable to the height modern
rooms are now made. The reaction from the low and oftentimes
gloomy rooms of the 16th and 17th centuries commenced in Queen
Anne's reign to the high and lofty ones then coming into fashion ;
this feeling has lasted to the present day and has done more to spoil
the proportions of modern houses, both inside and out, than any-
thing else. Rooms above a certain height become disproportionate
as regards their width and length, and unless the windows are carried
close up to the ceiling, they cannot be well ventilated.
It is a great addition to a house, to carry one room up higher
than the others, the hall perhaps taken up two stories, or the parlour
treated as a music room with panelled walls.
Perhaps the keynote to the treatment of the inside of a house,
whether in the town or country, is summed up in those two very
hackneyed words, " breadth and simplicity." Simplicity does not
mean in any way " poverty " of treatment, but restraint and common
sense in design. A house can be fitted up with the richest and
most exquisite materials and yet be absolutely quiet and dignified.
On the other hand it can be treated with the poorest materials but
in a manner that produces an overwhelming sense of garishness and
vulgarity.
Let us think of the arrangement often seen in an ordinary
room. An enormous cornice of heavy and cumbrous shape fills up
the angle of the ceiling, a coarse picture rail with a highly coloured
frieze and a deeply moulded skirting of vulgar detail entirely mar all
sense of repose and scale. A skirting to a room is put to prevent
the legs of chairs and pieces of furniture, &c. damaging the plaster
of the walls. It need be little more than a fillet some three or
four inches deep at the most, kept as plain and unobtrusive as
possible—as in Mr. Harrison Townsend's house at Letchworth
(B 92), and Mr. Percy Worthington's dining-room at "Barrows
Green" (B 108)—and in no sense as a decorative object. Yet
xvii