Rusticate the lowest storey or the basement, its stones marked by deep joints, as the plainest and strongest part of the building; keep the dressed stone, the orders and the ornament for the storeys above.
Floors of each period and room
Pave the hall and the saloon in stone, or in black and white marble laid in squares with a border; floor the living rooms with boards, of oak in the best rooms and deal elsewhere, or with parquet laid in squares; flag the offices with stone; and lay a carpet in the middle of the principal rooms, leaving a margin of floor round it.
The black and white marble of the Queen’s House hall and the stone of the Palladian halls belong to rooms entered from outdoors and treated as part of the building’s architecture. The living rooms had boards, scrubbed or waxed; the French laid parquet in squares of diagonal strips; and in England the Turkey carpet, and later carpets woven to the room’s own design, as Adam drew them to answer his ceilings, lay in the middle of the floor.
Related rules
Bind the corners of a wall with dressed stones laid alternately long and short on each face, so that they bond into both walls and mark the angle of the building.
Over a window in a brick front, turn a flat arch of soft red bricks rubbed and cut (gauged) to radiate from a centre below, laid with the finest joints, and give it a keystone of stone where the front is dressed in stone.
Glaze the sash windows in panes of equal size, three across: six over six on the ordinary storeys, six over nine on the tall windows of the principal floor, and three over three in the low windows of the attic.
Furnish the dining parlour with solid, substantial mahogany, without trifling ornament, and the drawing room with the lightest and most elegant furniture in the house, in satinwood and painted work, in keeping with its decoration; the library with bookcases and a library table, the bedchamber with what serves sleep and dressing.
In the panelled room, divide the wainscot as the order divides the wall: low panels below the dado rail, tall panels above it to the cornice, set out evenly between the doors, windows and chimneypiece; in the late seventeenth century frame them with bold bolection mouldings, in the early eighteenth make them raised and fielded.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Floors of each period and room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/period-floors. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.