Design the furniture of a principal room with the room: the chairs, settees and stools covered in the stuff of the walls or the bed, the tables and glasses drawn to the architecture of the piers and the chimneypiece, so that the room and its furniture are of one manner and one date.
From Marot onwards the designers of great rooms drew their furniture as part of them. Marot’s plates show the bed, its chairs and the wall hangings in one stuff; Kent designed the gilt tables, settees and chairs of Houghton and Holkham with their rooms; Adam drew the pier tables, glasses, sideboards and even the carpets of his rooms to answer their ceilings.
It follows that a house is furnished in the manner of the years its rooms were decorated in: a Palladian room of the 1730s with Kent’s furniture, a room of Adam’s with his and with Hepplewhite’s, a Regency room with Hope’s Greek furniture. The designer chooses the furniture by the manner of the decoration.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
Mark the main door by setting a segmental pediment inside a larger triangular one, or by breaking the pediment open to hold a cartouche or statue.
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.
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.
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 furniture made with the room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/furniture-en-suite. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.