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.
The correct church: orientated, with a distinct chancel
Orientate a church with its altar to the east; give it a chancel clearly distinct from the nave (lower, narrower and at least a third of its length); a porch, preferably on the south; a steep roof; a tower at the west or beside the nave; open benches instead of pews; and details of the Middle Pointed style.
Georgian churches were often preaching boxes: galleried halls, the pulpit dominant, the altar in a shallow recess. The Ecclesiologists wanted the medieval arrangement back, because they read it as the true expression of the liturgy: the chancel is the sanctuary, set apart and raised; the nave is for the people; the tower and spire proclaim the church to the parish.
Their judgements, published in The Ecclesiologist, were strict enough to make or break an architect’s reputation, and the parish church of the 1840s–60s (nave, lower chancel, south porch, west tower and broach spire) is largely their creation.
Related rules
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.
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.
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.
Give a pointed building a steep roof, the gable close to an equilateral triangle, which throws off rain and snow and completes the vertical character of the design.
pitch ≈ 55–60° (equilateral gable = 60°)
House the poor as a Christian community: small dwellings, each with its own door and hearth, round a garden court, with a chapel over the gate, not in a walled workhouse built for surveillance and punishment.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The correct church: orientated, with a distinct chancel”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/camden-church-arrangement. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.