In the formal room, stand the furniture against the walls and leave the middle of the room clear: a pier table (with its glass above) between each pair of windows, the sofa facing the fire, a chair either side of the chimneypiece, the chairs ranged round the walls in a line with the dado, to be brought out when wanted and put back after; and keep each wall symmetrical about its middle, its chimneypiece or its windows.
The house open on a lawn, groves at its sides
Let the grand front of the house open on a plain lawn of grass, adorned with statues and closed at its sides by open groves; beyond, plant wildernesses cut through by winding walks, and end every walk in a view of woods, a building, a ruin or the open country, rather than in clipped evergreens.
Langley wrote against the parterre of embroidery and the trees clipped into figures, which he thought costly and ugly, and for a garden after a “more grand and rural manner”. The lawn before the house, kept plain so that the front is seen whole, is the first of his directions; the groves and wildernesses, regular on the plan at their edges but threaded with serpentine walks, take the place of the parterres.
Gardens of this kind, by Charles Bridgeman and his contemporaries, were made at Stowe, Claremont and Rousham in the 1720s: a long lawn or canal on the axis of the house, groves and wildernesses either side, and the boundary opened at its end by a ha-ha.
Related rules
In the room of the Regency and after, bring the furniture out into the room in groups for the occupations of the company: a sofa by the fire with a sofa table before it, a round table in the middle with chairs round it, the pianoforte, a work table, a couch; leave the walls for the pier tables, the cabinets and the bookcases.
In place of a wall, bound the garden with a ditch whose side towards the garden is a vertical retaining wall and whose other side slopes up to the field, so that cattle are kept out and the view from the house runs on uninterrupted into the park.
ditch c. 1.5–2 m deep: wall on the garden side, turf slope on the park side
Let the character of the site direct the design: whether the ground should be raised or lowered, a view opened or closed, water led or stilled. Prefer variety, surprise and concealed bounds to symmetry.
Compose the garden as a painter composes a landscape: in groups of trees for light and shade, with water winding through the hollows and a temple or bridge placed where it will be seen across it, so that each turn of the walk opens a new picture.
Bring grass up to the walls of the house and keep the cattle off it with a ha-ha; plant trees in clumps on the rising ground and as single specimens on the lawn; and enclose the park with a belt of woodland, with a drive inside it from which the park is seen.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The house open on a lawn, groves at its sides”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/langley-lawn-and-groves. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.