William Pain
The Practical House Carpenter
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London · 1788 · English
Summarised and illustrated here; the text is not reproduced.
A carpenter’s and joiner’s pattern book of the years after Adam: the mouldings, cornices for rooms, architraves, doors, shutters and their boxings, staircases and chimneypieces, from the plainest to the enriched, drawn to be made in wood. Reprinted in Boston and Philadelphia, it was one of the books the American houses of the Federal years were finished from.
William Pain (c. 1730 – c. 1790) published a series of builders’ books from 1758 to 1788. The last and most used, The Practical House Carpenter, gives each part of the finishing in several degrees of richness, so that a builder could finish a house’s best rooms and its bedrooms from the same plates.
Rules drawn from Practical House Carpenter
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “William Pain, The Practical House Carpenter”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/source/pain. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.