The House in England and America

Most of this book is about the rules that architects wrote for temples, churches and palaces. The house had rules too, but for most of its history they were not written down by architects. They were carried in the hands of carpenters and masons, in the habits of the people who lived in the houses, and later in builders’ pattern books and in the books of reformers who wanted the house to be healthier, more private or more honest. They are rules of use: where the door should be, which room should open into which, which way the windows should face. This chapter follows them in England and America over six centuries.

The hall and its two ends

The English house of the Middle Ages was a hall with rooms at either end. Andrew Boorde, a physician, set down its order about 1540: the parlour joined to the head of the hall, the buttery and pantry at its lower end, the kitchen a little beyond them; the rest is known from the houses themselves. The hall was the house’s one large room, where the household ate, met and many of them slept; it rose to its roof timbers, and the smoke of a fire on an open hearth in the middle of its floor drifted up through a louvre in the roof. Its two ends were different in kind. At the lower end a screens passage ran across the house from the front door to the back, and off it opened the buttery and the pantry, with a passage between them to the kitchen, which often stood apart for fear of fire. At the upper end, where the high table stood on a low dais, a door led to the family’s rooms: a parlour, and over it the solar or great chamber.

℟The hall, its screens passage and its two ends

Put the hall at the heart of the house and enter it at one end, by a passage running through the house from front door to back door, screened from the hall. Open the buttery, the pantry and, between them, the way to the kitchen off that passage, at the hall’s lower end; put the family’s parlour, and the great chamber over it, beyond the hall’s upper end, where the high table stands.

The plan was the same for a manor house and a yeoman’s farmhouse; only the size changed. The great timber-framed houses of Kent and Sussex, the Wealden houses, put the two ends under one roof with the hall between them, their upper floors jettied out over the lower; elsewhere each end had its own cross-wing and gable, and the front of the house became the three gables of the Tudor manor. The frames were of oak, cut and jointed in the carpenter’s yard, and their panels filled with wattle and daub.

℟The jettied storey

In a timber-framed house, let the floor joists of an upper storey run out beyond the wall below and carry the upper wall on their ends: the upper storey oversails the lower by a foot or two, gaining room upstairs and sheltering the wall beneath.

In the sixteenth century the hearth moved into a chimney stack against a wall, and the hall no longer needed its height. Many halls were floored over to make a chamber above, and the house began to be lived in upstairs as much as down. But the order of the rooms, service at one end and family at the other, lasted until the classical house replaced it, and the open hall survived in the great houses as a room of ceremony, two storeys high, as at Hardwick.

The double pile and the pattern books

The classical house that took its place in the later seventeenth century was symmetrical about its front door. Behind the door a hall and stair ran through the middle of the house, and the rooms stood either side of them, two rooms deep: the double pile. The kitchen went into a basement or a wing, the servants to the attics, and the hall house’s two ends gave way to a front of evenly spaced sash windows, their heights diminishing up the storeys.

The rules of that front were the rules of the orders, scaled down. Few builders had read Palladio, but they had the pattern books, which gave the proportions of doors, windows and cornices in figures a carpenter could use. In America the books were the architecture. The colonial houses of Virginia and New England were built from English pattern books, and after independence Asher Benjamin wrote the first American ones.

℟Building from the pattern book

Take the plan, the orders and the details from the builders’ pattern books, simplified for timber and for the carpenter: a symmetrical front, a central hall and stair with rooms either side, a doorway under a pediment or fanlight, and mouldings drawn to be made with the plane.

Privacy: the Victorian house divided

The Victorian middle class wanted something the Georgian house had not offered: privacy, from the street and from the servants. Robert Kerr, an architect and professor, set out the principles in The Gentleman’s House (1864), and they shaped houses of every size for half a century. The house was to be divided into two departments, the family’s and the servants’, each with its own rooms, passages and stairs, joined only where the servants had to come through to serve.

Aspect was another of Kerr’s twelve qualities, worked out room by room: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the dining room to the north, cool for dinner in the evening, the kitchen and its offices to the north and the yard. In the suburban house this meant a hall or a passage from the front door, the front parlour and the dining room opening off it, and the kitchen and scullery behind, often in a narrower back wing. The front parlour got a bay window, which brought in light from three sides and let the family see the street without being seen.

℟The bay window

Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.

In America, Andrew Jackson Downing’s books made the same case for the country house and the cottage, with a moral tone of their own: a house should express the life of the family in it, and the veranda belonged to the American climate as much as the bay window to the English one.

℟The veranda

Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.

The living hall and the sun

By the end of the century architects were reacting against the Victorian house: its dark rooms, its corridors and its rigid divisions. The Arts and Crafts architects and their Edwardian successors wanted a house that was a single home. M. H. Baillie Scott and Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin built houses round a living hall, a large room with a fire, often in an inglenook, where the family spent its days and from which the other rooms opened. It must no longer be a passage, Baillie Scott wrote, and its stair must be enclosed or banished from it; Parker and Unwin kept the stair in the hall, but placed it where its traffic would not cross the seats by the fire.

Parker and Unwin went further on aspect than Kerr had. Every room lived in by day was to have the sun, and the house was to be turned to it, whatever the line of the road: the living room south and south-west, the kitchen north-east or east, the larder north. In the garden cities they planned, at Letchworth and Hampstead, whole streets of such houses were set out in groups round greens, and their example became the English council house and suburb.

The bungalow

In America the same ideas, carried by Gustav Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman (1901–16), produced the most popular house of the early twentieth century. The Craftsman house put the living room at its heart, its entrance hall reduced to a small vestibule or a nook: the front door opened from a deep porch almost straight into a room built round its fireplace, which opened widely into the dining room. In the bungalow, a house of one storey under a low, broad roof, the bedrooms lay along a short hall to one side with the bathroom between them.

Plan books and mail-order kit houses spread the bungalow across the suburbs of every American city, and its open living room and its porch passed into the ranch house after the Second World War. In six centuries the house had come round, in a sense, to where it began: one large room at its heart, with the rest of the house opening from it.