Make the stair of a palace a processional space: one broad flight rising to a landing, then turning back in two flights either side to arrive at the principal floor beneath a single great vault.
Chippendale’s three tastes, each in its room
Furnish each room in the taste that suits it: the modern (French) taste, carved and on cabriole legs, in the drawing room; the Chinese, with fretted backs on straight legs, in the bedchamber and the lady’s dressing room, especially one hung with Chinese paper; the Gothic in the library.
The Director offers most of its pieces in three tastes. Chippendale suggests the Chinese chairs for a lady’s dressing room hung with India paper, and the Gothic was felt to suit a library, as it did at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill; the French chairs, upholstered and carved, were for the drawing room.
Related rules
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.
Light the hall over the front door with a fanlight: a half-round light with bars radiating like the ribs of a fan, or, after 1770, an elliptical one, often with narrow lights at the sides of the door.
Set urns or statues on the pedestals of a balustrade crowning a front, over the piers and the angles, so that the skyline is broken at regular intervals.
Fill the middle of a pediment’s tympanum with the owner’s arms in a cartouche, a carved roundel, or a round window, or leave it plain on a severe front.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Chippendale’s three tastes, each in its room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/chippendale-tastes. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.