The house of the eighteenth century in Britain and its colonies: a symmetrical front of five or more bays round a central door, sash windows diminishing up the storeys, a hall and stair in the middle with two rooms either side, proportioned by the rules of the pattern books.
The Georgian house was the classical house made ordinary. The Palladian architects of the 1710s and 1720s had built villas and great houses after Palladio and Inigo Jones; the builders who followed them took the rules down to the scale of the town house, the parsonage and the farm. What they carried was less the temple front than a discipline: a symmetrical front, the door in the middle, the windows in even bays, their heights diminishing from the principal floor upwards, and a plan of a central hall and stair with a room either side, often two rooms deep, the double pile.
The rules travelled in books. Pattern books for builders, James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture (1728) and his Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732), Batty Langley’s manuals and William Pain’s Practical Builder, gave the orders, the proportions of doors and windows and the details of cornices and chimneypieces in a form a carpenter could follow. In America, where there were few architects, they were the architecture: the colonial houses of Virginia and New England were built from them, and after independence Asher Benjamin’s Country Builder’s Assistant (1797) and American Builder’s Companion (1806) adapted them to American timber and American needs.
The materials followed the place. In London and the English towns, brick fronts, stock-brick terraces and squares built by speculating builders under the Building Acts; in Bath, stone crescents and circuses. In New England, timber frames clad in painted clapboard, often with a gambrel roof; in Virginia and the Carolinas, brick plantation houses with dependencies set out symmetrically either side. After the Revolution the Federal style, influenced by Robert Adam’s light and delicate ornament, gave the American house elliptical fanlights, slender columns and oval rooms.
The style lasted, with changes of ornament, for more than a century, and it never quite went away. The Colonial Revival of the 1880s onwards made it the American suburban house par excellence, and the neo-Georgian of the twentieth century did the same in Britain.