Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (1864) | The Textbook of Architecture

The fullest Victorian treatise on the planning of a house: the qualities a good plan must have (among them privacy, comfort, convenience, light and air, aspect and prospect), each room of the family and of the servants in turn, and the passages that join and separate them.

Kerr (1823–1904) was a Scottish architect, a founder of the Architectural Association and professor of the arts of construction at King’s College London. The Gentleman’s House (1864) went through three editions and became the standard guide for those who planned country and suburban houses for the Victorian middle and upper classes.

The book divides the house into departments (the family’s rooms, the servants’ offices, and the ways between them) and asks, above all, that each be private from the other: the family should not meet the servants in its passages or hear the kitchen from its rooms, and the servants should have their own corridors and stairs. It also treats the aspect of every room, so that each has the sun at the hours it is used and the offices lie where their noise and smells will not reach the family.

The book, part by part

I Principles of plan

The qualities a gentleman’s house should have, considered one by one: privacy, comfort, convenience, spaciousness, compactness, light and air, salubrity, aspect and prospect, cheerfulness, elegance, importance and ornament.

Rules: The family’s rooms and the servants’, kept apart · Every room to its aspect

II The family department and the domestic offices

Each room in turn, its size, place, aspect and furniture: the hall, the dining room, the drawing room, the morning room, the library and the bedrooms; the kitchen, scullery, pantries and servants’ hall.

Rules drawn from The Gentleman’s House

The family’s rooms and the servants’, kept apart

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.

Every room to its aspect

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.