Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Rules · Plans · Façades · Theory
Let the plan make the picturesque
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.
Pugin attacks two kinds of dishonesty. The classical house hides an irregular plan behind a symmetrical front, with sham windows where there are no rooms; the fashionable “Gothic” villa invents irregular turrets and gables for their own sake. The medieval builder did neither: he built what was needed and the picturesque followed.
The rule became the founding principle of Victorian domestic architecture and passed, through Philip Webb’s Red House, to the Arts and Crafts.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
Make the roof visible, and bring its eaves down low enough, and far enough out, that the building reads as a shelter from the street and the garden.
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.
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.
Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Let the plan make the picturesque”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/pugin-irregular-plan. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.