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.
Kerr listed twelve qualities of a gentleman’s house: privacy, comfort, convenience, spaciousness, compactness, light and air, salubrity, aspect and prospect, cheerfulness, elegance, importance and ornament; and he put privacy first, calling the separation of the servants’ department from the family’s the foremost of all maxims.
Kerr made privacy the first quality of a good plan. The family should be able to move between its rooms without meeting servants at work; the servants should come and go, and the meals be carried from the kitchen to the dining room, without passing through the family’s part of the house; and the smells and noise of the kitchen should not reach the drawing room.
The rule produced the characteristic Victorian plan: a hall and stair at the centre or the side, the reception rooms at the front, and behind them, by a door that could be shut, the kitchen, scullery, larder and pantry, with a back door of their own, and in a large house a back stair. In a smaller house the same separation was made, more modestly, with a passage and a door.
Build on a single grid of 24 feet, set by the 8-foot spacing of the roof ridges and the size of the largest pane of glass, so that every column, girder, sash bar and pane is one of a few standard parts that can be made by machine, delivered and bolted together in any number.
pane 49 × 10 in · ridge 8 ft · bay 24 ft · spans 24, 48, 72 ft · 1,848 × 408 ft
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arrange a building for its uses first and let its outline follow: gables, bays, chimneys and towers go where the rooms behind need them. Never contrive irregularity for effect, and never force a symmetrical front on an unsymmetrical plan.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The family’s rooms and the servants’, kept apart”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kerr-privacy. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.