Take the plan, the orders and the details from the builders’ pattern books, simplified for timber and for the carpenter: a symmetrical front, a central hall and stair with rooms either side, a doorway under a pediment or fanlight, and mouldings drawn to be made with the plane.
The owner’s house and the farm under one plan
Put the owner’s house at the centre and join the farm buildings to it with covered porticoes (barchesse), so that one can go everywhere under cover; give granaries, cellars, stables and threshing floor their proper places, in proportion to the estate.
Palladio’s villa is a working farm with a gentleman’s house in the middle. The owner’s block is raised above the damp on its basement (The principal floor raised on a basement); the long arcaded barchesse on either side shelter carts, tools and produce and connect the house to stables, granaries and the steward’s house; the paved threshing floor (aia) lies in front. The house should be proportioned to the income of the land, neither poorer nor grander.
The dovecote towers that end the wings at Fanzolo and Maser come from Palladio’s practice rather than his text.
Related rules
Proportion rooms and façades by the same ratios that make musical consonances: 1:2 (octave), 2:3 (fifth), 3:4 (fourth), and their compounds.
short plans 1:1, 2:3, 3:4 · medium 1:2, 4:9, 9:16 · long 1:3, 3:8, 1:4
Make rooms round, square, or with a length equal to the diagonal of the square, to a square and a third, a square and a half, a square and two-thirds, or two squares.
circle · 1:1 · 1:√2 · 3:4 · 2:3 · 3:5 · 1:2
Place rooms on the right of the entrance equal and corresponding to those on the left, so that the house is alike on both sides and the walls bear the roof equally.
Make a simple square room as high as it is wide, so that it encloses a cube; for oblong rooms the double cube (twice as long as it is wide and high) is satisfactory in almost any circumstances.
Keep a corridor’s height to no more than one and a half times its width, and divide its length into bays about as long as it is wide, marked by pilasters and by the divisions of the ceiling or vault.
H ≤ 1½ W; bay ≈ W
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The owner’s house and the farm under one plan”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/palladio-villa-plan. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.