Rules · Doors & windows · Light
Line the reveals of the windows with panelled boxes into which the shutters fold back by day; panel the wall under the sill, and where the sill is low make a seat of it; dress the window with an architrave like the doors’; and hang curtains in the manner of the period, drawn up in festoons in the eighteenth century, in pairs under a pelmet or draped valance in the Regency.
The deep walls of the Georgian house left room for the shutters to fold into the reveals, behind panelled linings, so that by day the window was framed in joinery and by night closed with it. The carpenters’ books give the boxings, the folding leaves and the window backs below the sill.
Curtains followed fashion. The festoon or pull-up curtain, drawn up in swags under the head, was the usual curtain of the eighteenth-century room; pairs of draw curtains with a draped valance came in towards its end and were the rule in the Regency.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Over a long row of windows on the principal floor, set triangular and segmental pediments in turn, so that the row is read in pairs and does not run on monotonously.
Break the architrave of a door or window with blocks of plain stone laid across it, alternately larger and smaller, and set a keystone in the middle of the head.
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.
Carry the front wall up as a parapet in front of the roof instead of eaves of timber (1707); set the window frames back four inches behind the face of the brick (1709), and later hide the sash boxes wholly in the reveals (1774).
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Windows seen from within: shutters, seats and curtains”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/windows-within. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.