English house

“ Nothing will help to show how the central idea of an English house developed, while tenaciously adhering to its essence, so much as a comparison of the plans of a number of houses built during the sixteenth century and the early part of the seventeenth. ”

“ As pointed out in the last issue in speaking of the country houses of France, the impulse to associate in communities has been a stronger power in moulding the domestic architecture of France than the desire to have an independent home. In England the isolated house is the type. The social unit is the family, and consequently the architectural unit is the “home.” The English character has given to the family an independence and privacy, a permanence and sacredness which are all reflected in the English houses, and it is this which makes them homes. ”

“ Every student of architecture knows that the thirteenth century in England is a zenith of Early English Gothic, why is it that the manor-house and the great landowner’s residence did not come under the influence of art then flourishing in the country? ”

“ It is not difficult for any one to trace a likeness between the house of to-day and that of, let us say, the time of Elizabeth; but the resemblance between an Elizabethan manor house and a Norman castle or a Northumbrian peel-tower is not by any means so obvious, yet the descent of one from the other can be clearly [2] established. ”

“ And now began my search for a house, which I conducted according to my English notions and prepossessions. In the south of France, or in Italy, a man of twenty thousand francs a year [Pg 215] lives in a larger house than a man of an income of as many pounds sterling inhabits in London. In England, a nine months winter, an enormous tax on windows, a duty on bricks, timber, and glass, reduce us to content ourselves with small houses; but in these countries, large rooms, lofty ceilings, wide staircases, are required by the climate, and by no means astonish the minds of those who are used to them. ”

“ We have often heard foreigners laughingly remark of sundry London houses—apropos of the deep, open, sunk areas, bordered by iron railings, of many of them—that they illustrate, in some sense, our English reserve, and love of carrying out our island proverb—viz., that “every Englishman’s house is his castle,”—in its entirety, by each man barricading himself off from his neighbours advances by a fortified fosse! ”

“ English houses have so long established themselves in the forefront of domestic architecture that the distinctive qualities which they exhibit need not be enlarged upon; no houses excel them for quiet dignity, appropriate treatment, and charm of effect. ”

“ The dark ages were past, the Renaissance was at hand. This, therefore, will be a convenient point at which to break off for a time the story of the growth of the house, and turn our attention to some of the features which lend interest to such dwellings as we have been considering. ”

“ I do not know a more fascinating race of beings than these little fabled people, that haunted the southern sides of hills and mountains, lurked in flowers and about fountain-heads, glided through key-holes into ancient halls, watched over farm-houses and dairies, danced on the green by summer moonlight, and on the kitchen-hearth in winter. They seem to accord with the nature of English housekeeping and English scenery. I always have them in mind, when I see a fine old English mansion, with its wide hall and spacious kitchen ”

“ The unusual charm of the house springs from the fact that very few alterations have been made, and that it retains its old furniture, books, and pictures, which combine to produce a fine feeling of old-fashioned comfort and culture. ”

“ A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; while we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell. We live a while in Boston, and then a while in New York, and then, perhaps, turn up at Cincinnati. Scarcely any body with us is living where they expect to live and die. The man that dies in the house he was born in is a wonder. There is something pleasant in the permanence and repose of the English family estate, which we, in America, know very little of. ”

“ Our English kin hate a walled town or a stone house, and they would not live within the strong walls, whose wide span was, save for the king’s palace, which was built partly of the house of the Roman governor, and these other halls, which went for naught in so wide a meadow, empty and green, and crossed by two paved roads, with grass growing between the stones. ”

“ Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household; ”

“ Its happy occupants, however, were fortunately not actually staying there (happy occupants, in England, are almost always absent) , and the house was exhibited with a civility worthy of its admirable beauty. Everything that in the material line can make life noble and charming has been gathered up into it with that profusion that one can find only in a great English "territorial" dwelling. As I wandered from one stately room to another, looking at these things, that ineffaceable impression upon my fancy that I just mentioned was delightfully deepened. ”

“ There were no paintings on the walls, but a small gallery in the rear of the house contained a good collection. The effect of the living rooms without the bright, living faces would have been somewhat sombre. I think a happy medium would be desirable, a little more bric-a-brac in European homes and a little less in our own, in which I have often had to navigate carefully to avoid running against ornamental articles. The English people are at their best under their own ‘fig-tree.’ They build homes for a{57} lifetime, and for their children and grandchildren after them. ”

“ The character of a house is largely determined by its plan, and the plan is the expression of the wants and habits of the inmates. Accordingly we find that the wants and habits of English people, being far less susceptible of change than their taste in ornament and decoration, caused the plan of their houses to follow the old lines long after the superficial decoration had taken on itself the foreign fashion. ”

“ First their building of houses, whose frames are formed like our garden-arbours, something more round, very strong and handsome, covered with close-wrought mats of their owne weaving, which deny entrance to any drop of raine, though it come both fierce and long, neither can the piercing North winde finde a crannie, through which he can conveigh his cooling breath, they be warmer than our English houses ”

“ The other fronts are surrounded with walled gardens which extend a considerable distance on every side, and are backed up by plantations and a wide avenue. The house itself is plain in character, depending for its effect largely upon its symmetrical arrangement. ”

“ The great ones of the land now housed themselves in splendid buildings, and surrounded themselves with splendid gardens. Nobody grumbled; the whole community concurred in this exaltation of birth combined with wealth. Men whose names to us are household words sought the patronage of others whose names and doings are hardly recorded outside the pages of the “Complete Peerage.” Manners, customs, dress emphasised this condition at the time; architecture reflects it to-day.
[196]
Fig. 132.—Boughton House, Northamptonshire. ”

“ The house itself is a not unworthy imitation of an English manor-house, with its aspect of old-time grandeur and picturesque repose. It is of wood, two and a half stories high, with twelve dormer windows, a gambrel roof, and a large two-story L. In front there are two rows of tall and stately elms, and the trim little garden is enclosed by a painted iron fence. ”

“ Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D—— in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. ”

“ New villas or old manor-houses on lawny uplands, knitting, as it were, together England's feudal memories with England's freeborn hopes,—the old land with its young people; for England is so old, and the English are so young! ”

“ The house is a castle which the king cannot enter. ”

“ Is it not by virtue of the past life and compassion of the great houses that the little ones achieve their beauty in miniature, and, lastly, their sweet appropriateness to the usages of modern life? The great house begat these little ones of to-day—no hovels, but decent homes—which spring up all over England and Scotland and Ireland—in the hollows or heights of downs, in richly watered places, on ridges, by the fringes of woods, upon the sea flank—creeping up almost impudently to the very skirts of the great “places” which have passed into the traditions of history. ”

“ The English home, that is tennis and warm water, the gong summoning you to lunch, books, meadows, comfort selected, stabilized and blessed by the centuries, freedom of children and patriarchal disposition of parents, hospitality and a formalism as comfortable as a dressing gown; in brief, the English home is the English home, and therefore I have drawn it from memory together with the cuckoo and the rabbit ”

“ The French cottage, therefore, is just such as we should have expected from the disposition of its inhabitants: its massive windows, its broken ornaments, its whole air and appearance, all tell the same tale of venerable age, respected and preserved, till at last its dilapidation wears an appearance of neglect. Again, the Englishman will sacrifice everything to comfort, and will not only take great pains to secure it, but he has generally also the power of doing so; for the English peasant is, on the average, wealthier than the French. ”

“ Whilst I have been advocating the merits of our Elizabethan houses, you must not suppose I refer to the multitudes of grotesque little villas which grow up every summer round London; or to those alterations and adaptations, by which one sees Gothic spires, plastered over with stucco, starting up out of one half of an old farm house; the walls notched into battlements, and uncouth animals set a grinning against each other over the gate posts, and the hall crammed and fortified with rusty swords and pikes of all ages and fashions. ”

“ Occasionally one sees an attractive petrol-station: a few pounds spent in prizes would produce a crop of good designs from architects. One hesitates to offer any advice to the builders of churches of any kind, but here again one asks no more than decent respect for the spirit of old England.
The toughest nut to crack in all this matter of design is, however, the question of the shop and the dwelling-house, under which head I include, as a matter of courtesy, the bungalow. An Englishman’s house is his castle, and he resents any interference with the rights of the subject. ”

“ They cannot be naturalized without naturalizing their conditions. The gray ancestral houses of England are the beautiful symbols of the permanence of family and of caste. They are the embodiments of traditional institutions and culture. When we speak of the House of Stanley or of Howard, the expression is not wholly figurative. ”

“ One type of dwelling, indeed, is found to be more or less prevalent through all the urban aggregation. That is the small four or five-roomed cottage, containing on the ground floor a front parlour, a kitchen, and a scullery built as an addition to the main part [101] of the house; and on the upper floor the bedrooms, the third bedroom in the five-roomed house being built over the scullery. And in such dwelling-places, if anywhere, is concealed the secret of the future of the people of England. ”

“ No house in England is more picturesque, either in itself, or its surroundings. It looks ancient, though in good repair. It is not far from sixty feet long, a story and a half high, or fifteen feet, with a pitched roof covered with thatch. ”

“ To the many mansions of this style, as well as those of the more purely Elizabethan, and drawings of them, as Wollaton, Hardwicke, and the Duke's House, Bradford, we would recommend the architects of our own day to turn their attention, instead of burdening the finest parks and scenes of England with the square, unmeaning masses of brick and stone, which offend our eyes in so many directions, and cause foreigners to ridicule the want of architectural genius in England. ”

“ Naturally the more expensive houses were the first to get the benefit of the architectural inspiration drawn largely from England. But now that English gables and dormers have spread so widely, now that we realize the beauty of our own colonial architecture, and that the Queen Anne craze is subsiding, so that only its best features remain, the less ambitious dwellings must not be left to the mercy of those builders whose ideas of beauty are limited to scroll-saw brackets and French roofs. ”

“ To me the most attractive part of English life is that in the home. The Englishman gathers his family about him, pulls down the blinds, reads his newspaper and is in his castle, which no lord or duke can enter without his consent. ”

“ With their gable roofs of cosy thatch or of red tiles bright with moss and lichen, with their ornamented chimneys and walls of plaster laced and interlaced with heavy beams, the Cottage Homes of England, peeping out from the green lanes of Kent, or fringing the Surrey commons, or nestling in the wooded vales of Sussex, are always picturesque. They are, moreover, the one form of human habitation always in harmony with the scenery around them. ”

“ The English countryside to-day, still a thing of beauty, with its thatched cottages and old high-timbered roofs and glory of village churches, presents a picture similar to those in which races of dulled intelligence blink and creep within cities of magnificent architecture once raised by their ancestors, the secrets of whose construction they have neither energy nor intelligence to regain. ”