To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.
Rules · Ornament · Proportion
The chimneypiece sized and ornamented for its room
Size the opening of the fireplace to the room it warms, small in a closet or bedroom and broad in a hall or saloon, the opening of a small chimney nearly as high as it is wide and of a large one lower in proportion; and make the chimneypiece as rich as the room: an architectural piece with its overmantel in a state room, a plain moulded surround and shelf in a bedroom.
Chambers gives the size of the fireplace opening by the size of the room, and its height in relation to its width, and Ware and the pattern books of Gibbs and Pain draw chimneypieces in every degree of richness. The widths the designer uses, from about 0.85 m in a small room to about 1.35 m in a great one, are editorial.
The design follows the period. The Palladian chimneypiece of Kent and Gibbs has an eared architrave round the opening, a frieze with a tablet, a cornice for the shelf, consoles at the sides in the grandest rooms, and over it a picture in a frame of its own under a pediment. The Rococo carved its surround in scrolls and set a glass above. Adam made it of white marble with slender columns or terms carrying a frieze with a carved tablet in the middle; the Regency reduced it to reeded jambs with roundels in the corner blocks; the Greek Revival set it between plain antae under a heavy shelf. The American pattern books of Pain and Asher Benjamin gave the Federal mantel of painted wood with colonnettes and a tablet.
Related rules
Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
Proportion every step so that twice its height plus its depth equals the length of a natural pace on the level: two feet, or 24 pouces.
2 r + g = 24 pouces ≈ 65 cm (modern practice: 60–66 cm)
Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Break the architrave of a door or window with blocks of plain stone laid across it, alternately larger and smaller, and set a keystone in the middle of the head.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The chimneypiece sized and ornamented for its room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/chimneypiece-by-room. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.