A house by its style’s rules
A house planned and built by the rules of its period, as the Design a Building app plans one: its rooms, its front, its roof and chimneys; or cut open to show its plan, furnished.
The rules it illustrates
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 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 family’s rooms and the servants’, kept apart. Plan the house in two departments, the family’s and the servants’, with their own rooms and passages (and, as the house grows larger, their own stairs), so that neither sees nor hears the other in the ordinary course of the day: the kitchen and its offices to one side or behind, reached by their own corridor, and nothing of the work of the house carried through the family’s rooms.
Every room to its aspect. Give each room the aspect that suits the hours it is used: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the library a little east of south-east, the dining room to the north or north-east, cool and out of the evening sun, and the kitchen and offices to the north; the best aspect of all is south-east, the worst south-west.
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.
The hall to live in. Make the hall, not a passage, but the house’s largest and most used room: a great fire with a seat beside it, the other rooms opening off it, and the stair kept out of it or enclosed, so that it does not make the hall a thoroughfare.
Plan for the sun. Turn the house to the sun rather than to the street: the living rooms on the sunny side, lit from more than one direction, the kitchen and stores on the cool side, and the fewer and larger rooms the better.
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.
Where it appears in the book
In the styles Tudor, Georgian and Colonial, Victorian, Craftsman, Edwardian.
In the chapters The House in England and America.