What makes a Georgian house? How to recognise one

The Georgian period runs from the accession of George I in 1714 to the death of George IV in 1830. Its houses are found all over Britain and Ireland: the brick terraces and squares of London, Bristol and Dublin, the stone crescents of Bath, the New Town of Edinburgh, and in every market town the merchant’s house, the rectory and the farmhouse. The American house of the same years is treated in its own guide, under Colonial.

What to look for

The roof. Low-pitched and usually hipped, and in towns often hidden altogether behind a parapet. The London Building Act of 1707 did away with the timber eaves cornice for fear of fire, and the parapet took its place. Chimneys stand at the ends of the house or on the party walls of a terrace; dormers light the attics.

The windows. Sash windows, most often of six panes over six, in strict rows and evenly spaced. Their heights diminish up the front: the tallest on the principal floor, which in a town house is the first floor, the shortest at the top. Glazing bars are thick in the early houses and become very thin by 1800. After the Building Act of 1709 London windows were set back from the face of the wall, and after 1774 their sash boxes were hidden behind the brick; flush frames suggest a house of before those dates or outside London. Some blank windows were blocked to save window tax, but many were built blind to keep the front regular.

The door. A panelled door, often of six panels, in a doorcase of pilasters or columns carrying a pediment or an entablature. As the century went on, a fanlight over the door lit the hall, semicircular and later often elliptical. A detached house has its door in the centre; a terrace house of three bays has it to one side.

The materials. Brick, usually in Flemish bond, red or brown early, and in London increasingly yellow or grey stock brick; flat arches of finely rubbed brick over the windows; stone for the doorcase, the cornice and the quoins. In stone districts the whole front is of ashlar. From about 1800, in the late Georgian or Regency years, fronts were often covered in stucco and painted.

The plan. The detached house is a double pile: a hall and stair through the middle and two rooms either side, two rooms deep. The terrace house has one room at the front and one at the back on each floor, with the stair beside them, a kitchen in the basement, and an area in front behind iron railings.

℟Rooms paired about the axis

Place rooms on the right of the entrance equal and corresponding to those on the left, so that the house is alike on both sides and the walls bear the roof equally.

What it is confused with

The commonest confusion is with the neo-Georgian of the twentieth century. Look at the bricks: a wall built after about 1920 with a cavity shows only the long sides of the bricks, stretcher bond, while a solid Georgian wall shows the ends as well. Neo-Georgian windows tend to be wider in proportion, the panes larger and the frames heavier. Houses of the late seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries, often called Queen Anne or William and Mary, look much alike, but their roofs are steeper and show above a carved eaves cornice, and their window frames sit flush with the wall. Early Victorian houses keep the Georgian front but have larger panes, two or four to a sash, and the small projecting horns at the bottom of the upper sash that heavier glass needed.

The rules its builders followed

The rules came from Palladio, by way of the English Palladians and the pattern books. Few builders had read Palladio himself, but the books of James Gibbs, Batty Langley and William Pain gave them the orders and the proportions of doors, windows and cornices in figures they could use with dividers and a rule. The Building Acts did the rest, setting the materials and the details of the town house street by street.

℟Divide, do not multiply

Find every member of an order by dividing the given height into equal parts with the compasses, and those parts again, so that no arithmetic is needed.

height → 5 parts: 1 entablature + 4 column (without pedestal)