Victorian: its rules, features and buildings | The Textbook of Architecture

The house of the nineteenth century’s new middle class: planned for privacy and convenience, its family’s rooms and its servants’ kept apart, its front made picturesque with gables, bay windows, porches and borrowed ornament (Italianate, Gothic, then Queen Anne).

The Victorian house was, above all, planned. Robert Kerr’s The Gentleman’s House (1864) listed the qualities its owners wanted, among them privacy, comfort, convenience, light and air, aspect and prospect, and elegance; and the first of these ruled the rest. The house was divided into the family’s department and the servants’, each with its own rooms and passages, and in larger houses its own stairs, so that neither saw nor heard the other in the course of the day; and each room was given its aspect: the drawing room to the south-east, the morning room to the east, the dining room to the north, cool at dinner, and the kitchen and its offices to the north.

Smaller houses followed the same principles on a smaller plot. The terraced and semi-detached houses of the suburbs that the railways opened up had a passage from the front door along one side, a front parlour and a back room opening off it, and a kitchen and scullery in a narrower wing behind, the back extension that gave the Victorian terrace its saw-toothed rear. The bay window, usually canted, brought light and a view of the street into the front room, and the Building Acts that followed the cholera epidemics fixed the widths of streets, the heights of rooms and the drainage behind them.

The fronts changed with fashion. The Italianate villa of the 1840s and 1850s, with its low-pitched roofs on bracketed eaves and its round-headed windows, gave way to the Gothic of the 1860s, which John Ruskin and the High Victorians made a matter of honesty: pointed arches, polychrome brick and steep gables. In America, A. J. Downing’s books (1842 and 1850) spread both, along with the board-and-batten cottage and the veranda. From the 1870s Norman Shaw and the Queen Anne style brought red brick, tile-hanging, white-painted sashes, Dutch gables and the irregular, comfortable plan, and in America the Queen Anne became a riot of turrets, porches and patterned shingles.

Behind the ornament the Victorian house was a machine of new services: gas lighting, piped water, the water closet, the kitchen range and, by the end of the century, electric light and the telephone. Its plan, more than its ornament, is what the next generation reacted against.

Fig. 1The plan, divided: the drawing room and dining room at the front, the kitchen, scullery and pantry behind, kept apart from them. Open in Models ↗

Fig. 2The Gothic of the parsonage and the school, after Butterfield and Street. Open in Models ↗

Recognise it by

A plan divided between the family’s rooms and the servants’

The principal rooms to the garden and the sun; the kitchen to the back

A side passage or central hall with the stair; a back wing for the kitchen

Canted or square bay windows, often two storeys high

Steep gables with bargeboards; slate or tile roofs

Brick, often polychrome, with stone or terracotta dressings

Plate-glass sashes of two panes; porches and verandas

Ornament borrowed from Italy, the Gothic and the Queen Anne

Buildings

Osborne HouseIsle of Wight · 1845–51 · Thomas Cubitt with Prince AlbertThe Italianate villa of the royal family.

TyntesfieldSomerset · 1863–65 · John NortonA High Victorian Gothic country house.

BearwoodBerkshire · 1865–74 · Robert KerrKerr’s own principles of privacy, built.

CragsideNorthumberland · 1869–95 · Richard Norman ShawThe first house lit by hydroelectricity.

Bedford ParkChiswick, London · from 1875 · Richard Norman Shaw and othersA Queen Anne suburb.

Carson MansionEureka, California · 1884–86 · Samuel and Joseph NewsomThe American Queen Anne at its most exuberant.

The rules of Victorian

The ridge-and-furrow roof

Glaze a roof in a series of small ridges and valleys, the panes set at an angle on light sash bars, so that the low sun of morning and evening strikes the glass more squarely, the roof is stiffened by its folds, and the rain runs into gutters in the furrows.

The Crystal Palace grid of 24 feet

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

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.

The bay window

Let the principal room of the front stand out in a bay window, canted or square, under its own gable: more light, a view along the street as well as across it, and a front that shows where the best room is.

The veranda

Give the country house in a hot summer climate a veranda, or piazza, some seven or eight feet deep: a roofed porch along the front on light posts, stopping short of the ends of the front, shading the windows and the walls and giving the household a room out of doors.