What makes a Palladian house? How to recognise one

Andrea Palladio built his villas for the landowners of the Veneto, round Vicenza and Venice, between the 1540s and his death in 1580, and published them in his Four Books of Architecture in 1570. Inigo Jones brought the manner to England in the 1610s, but the Palladian house as a type belongs to the generation after 1715, when Colen Campbell, Lord Burlington and William Kent made it the style of the Whig country house. From England it went to Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies, where Drayton Hall in South Carolina and Jefferson’s Monticello are its best-known examples.

What to look for

The portico. The surest sign. The centre of the front carries a portico of columns under a pediment, like the front of a temple, either standing free or set against the wall as attached columns or pilasters. Palladio thought the ancients had put such fronts on their houses, and gave them to his villas for that reason.

℟The temple front on the house

Give the front of a country house a portico with a pediment, as the ancients did, for it shows the entrance, gives grandeur, and makes a place to display the owner’s arms.

The raised floor. The principal rooms stand on a basement that holds the kitchens and stores, and the visitor climbs an outside stair to reach them. The basement is often rusticated, its stone cut in heavy blocks, while the floor above, the piano nobile, is smooth.

℟The principal floor raised on a basement

Raise the principal rooms of a house on a basement storey that holds the kitchens, cellars and service rooms, and reach them by an external stair; put the lesser rooms above them.

The windows. Tallest on the principal floor, often with pediments over them; small and square in the attic storey above and the basement below. A serliana, the Venetian window of an arch between two narrower flat-headed lights, is common in the English houses.

The roof and walls. The roof is low and hipped, sometimes hidden behind a balustrade, and in a few houses, Chiswick and Mereworth among them, crowned with a dome over a central hall. Palladio built in brick covered with stucco; the English used stone or brick with stone dressings, and the Americans brick.

The plan and wings. The plan is symmetrical about the axis of the door, the rooms on one side matching those on the other, and the rooms are proportioned by simple ratios: square, a square and a half, two squares. Many houses add wings, straight or curved, joining the main block to two pavilions in a five-part composition.

What it is confused with

The Georgian house is Palladianism made plain, and the two shade into each other. A house with a portico, a basement storey and a principal floor above it is Palladian; a brick front of even sash windows with a pedimented doorcase and no portico is Georgian, though it follows the same symmetry. The English Baroque of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, which the Palladians set out to replace, builds up its front towards the centre in massed, projecting blocks, with giant orders and broken pediments. The Neoclassical houses of Robert Adam and the Greek Revival that followed use thinner, shallower ornament, rooms with apses and ovals, and, in the Greek Revival, the heavier Greek Doric. One Venetian window on a Victorian villa does not make it Palladian.

The rules its builders followed

These were written rules. Palladio’s book gave the orders, the shapes of rooms and the heights of their vaults, and the English Palladians had it translated and redrawn. Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus showed the new houses, and James Gibbs’s books carried the details to builders who would never see Italy.