What makes a Tudor house? How to recognise one

The Tudor house belongs to England and Wales between the late fifteenth century and about 1600, though the houses it grew from go back to the fourteenth century and the type lasted in the country well into the seventeenth. Most survivors are timber-framed: in the south-east (Kent, Sussex, Essex and Suffolk), in the West Midlands and in Cheshire and Lancashire. Where good building stone lay to hand, in the Cotswolds, the limestone belt and the north, the same plan was built in stone.

What to look for

The roof. Steep, at about fifty degrees, covered in clay tiles, thatch or, in stone country, stone slates, and ending in gables. A larger house has a cross-wing at one or both ends, each under its own gable set at right angles to the hall roof. From the sixteenth century the chimney stacks are tall and of brick, often clustered, with shafts that are moulded, twisted or set diagonally.

The walls. In a framed house the oak shows on the outside. In the east and south-east the posts often stand close together, close studding, which was a show of wealth; in the west the frame is divided into square panels, sometimes filled with curved and cusped braces for display. The panels are filled with wattle and daub or later with brick. The sharp black-and-white of many frames is largely a nineteenth-century taste; earlier timbers were usually left to weather silver-grey or limewashed with the panels.

The jetty. An upper storey that oversails the one below by a foot or two, carried on the ends of the floor joists. In the Wealden house of Kent and Sussex the two ends are jettied and the hall between them is not, so the front steps back under one long roof.

℟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.

The windows. Wider than they are tall, divided by mullions of oak or stone, and glazed, where they were glazed at all, with small leaded panes, often diamond-shaped. A bay window lights the upper end of the hall; oriels on brackets light the chambers above.

The door. It is not in the middle. It opens into one end of the hall, at the screens passage, and its head is often a flattened, four-centred arch. A larger house may have a porch of two storeys in front of it.

The plan. Inside the door the passage runs through the house to a back door. On one side are the service rooms, the buttery and pantry with the way to the kitchen between them; on the other is the hall, and beyond the hall the family’s parlour with the great chamber over it. Many halls, first open to the roof, were floored over in the sixteenth century when a chimney replaced the open hearth; smoke-blackened rafters in the roof are the proof that a hall was once open.

℟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.

What it is confused with

Most houses called Tudor were built between about 1880 and 1939: the Tudor Revival, or “Tudorbethan”, of the suburbs. The difference is in the timber. In a real frame the timbers are thick, irregular and joined with oak pegs, and they carry the house; the panels sit flush with them, and carpenters’ marks, numerals cut at the joints, are often visible. Revival timbers are thin boards fixed to brick or render, usually only in the gables or the upper storey, and their patterns are regular. The revival house has a plan of its own period, with a hall and stair behind a door that may well be central, and its jetty, if it has one, is a gesture rather than a structure.

The great Elizabethan and Jacobean houses, such as Hardwick or Longleat, are a different case. They keep the hall but set it in a symmetrical front with Renaissance ornament, and they are of stone or brick. The Arts and Crafts and Edwardian houses that borrowed half-timbered gables are closer in spirit, but they too have a modern plan behind the gables.

The rules its builders followed

Nobody wrote the rules of the Tudor house down as rules. They were carried by carpenters and masons and by the habits of the household, and Andrew Boorde’s note of about 1540 on the order of the rooms is one of the few contemporary descriptions. What is known comes from the houses themselves, as J. H. Parker and later J. A. Gotch measured them. The constant was the order of the rooms, service at one end of the hall and family at the other, which lasted until the classical house replaced it.