Show the natural beauties of a place and hide its defects; give it an appearance of extent and freedom by disguising the boundary; conceal every interference of art, so that the whole seems natural; and remove or hide whatever serves only convenience and cannot be made ornamental.
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A terrace and flower garden at the foot of the house
Do not bring the park up to the walls of a house: give the house a terrace, steps and a flower garden in formal lines between it and the park, because the house is a work of art and must be joined to the landscape by art.
Repton began as Brown’s successor and ended by undoing part of Brown’s work. A house standing in grass, he argued, looks as if it had been dropped there; it needs a foreground of architecture, a terrace with a balustrade, from which the park is seen as a picture. Flowers, banished by Brown to walled gardens, should return near the house, and conservatories should open off the living rooms. In his later commissions, such as Ashridge (1813) and Woburn, he designed groups of small gardens of different characters next to the house.
Price had asked for the same thing in 1794, praising the old Italian terraces Brown had destroyed. The Victorian Italianate terrace grew from these arguments.
Related rules
Let the approach be the natural road to the house, without needless turns; let it show the house first at an angle, so that two sides are seen, and not head-on down an avenue; and make it plain that the road leads to this house and nowhere else.
Value in a landscape the qualities painters seek, roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, which are neither beautiful nor sublime but picturesque; keep old trees, broken banks and intricate views, and do not smooth everything into lawn and clump.
Plant each tree and shrub apart, with room to grow to its full natural form, so that it can be seen and admired as a specimen; prefer foreign kinds to native ones, so that the place is recognised at once as a garden, a work of art.
Raise tender plants in glasshouses through the winter and plant them out in early summer, massed in beds cut in the lawn or on a terrace, in blocks, ribbons or patterns of a few strong colours; lift them in autumn and replant for the next season.
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
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A terrace and flower garden at the foot of the house”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/repton-terrace. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.