English country house floor plans: preliminary findings

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just couldn’t find any information about 17th - 18th - 19th century English country house floorplans on the internet. It just wasn’t there. So today, I turned to my university’s library.

What I emerged with are three folios of architectural drawings, two for Tudor houses, and one by the architect James Paine, first published in 1761 (republished 1967), that includes drawings for Kedleston Hall among others. The folios were massive, and I barely got them to my car. I definitely need a lackey.

Anyway, it’s been enlightening. I am most of the way through the Paine folio, and here are my preliminary findings, in case any one in the world but me is interested (the folios hadn’t been checked out since the university instituted bar coding in the libraries, so apparently no one here is…)

If anyone else has any advice about where I can find more floorplans, or generalities about English houses from this era, please please chime in.

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An “apartment” really is an apartment, comprising three or four rooms plus some cupboards; these rooms may be called variously “bedchamber” “closet” and “dressing room”. A bedroom, on the other hand, may or may not have an attached dressing room. One of the houses has a sort of spa–the “bath.” The kitchen complex consists of the main kitchen, the pastry, the scullery, and wet and dry larders. Among the “offices,” the main butler, housekeeper, and steward have apartments to themselves, and the steward has his own dining room to boot; also there is usually an apartment “for his lordship’s personal use”, a servant’s hall, a butler’s pantry, and the steward’s accounting room. The family live in apartments on the the Principal and Chamber floors; guests are relegated to bedrooms in the Mezzanine and Attic floors. There are quite often low-ceilinged partial floors (which is what a Mezzanine is) tucked above or below the apartments, for personal attendants. Some bedrooms have small sleeping rooms for servants attached. Very grand houses have attached chapels, and an apartment for the chaplain. The library, as often as not, isn’t a true room but rather one whole wing of one whole floor, serving as a passageway between other wings, or as the passageway between the principal part of the house and some other lesser-used place like state apartments or the chapel. Quite frequently there are multiple Chamber floors, cut off from each other, accessible by different staircases. Additional kitchens, laundries, smithies, brewhouses, dairies, &c. are not physically connected to the house in any of the drawings, though they are often contained in a courtyard accessible from the house.

Some houses consist of a central portion, which the family and its guests occupy, and up to four wings containing the kitchens and rooms for kitchen servants, offices and apartments for the important domestics, stables and rooms for the stable boys, or the chapel and the chaplain’s quarters. Others have the kitchens and offices half-buried in the Base floor.

The rooms are, as a rule, quite large. 16x18, 20x30, and 24x36 are the favorite proportions of the architect responsible for this folio. Libraries and drawing rooms can be 150 or 200 feet long.

2

No guidance for you, just want to say I find it all fascinating! I’ve come across a few modern books that give floorplans of some famous homes, but nothing from the period itself. Now I have a new goal the next time I go to the library.

3

Hooray! I’m not the ONLY one.

4

Very cool! Is the “pastry” like a bakery room? I wonder why it’s separate from the main kitchen. Maybe to keep lard and butter from melting in the heat of the kitchen fires while you’re working it into the flour?
(I have no scholarly knowledge of any of this, just a prurient fascination.)

5

I don’t know. I have to go back and take a closer look at the kitchen complexes. Some of the rooms have large round basins in the plan–sinks with drains, perhaps? The scullery definity has one, and either the pastry or the main kitchen too. I’ll report later today. The pastry is sometimes double-classified as that and “the cook’s room.”

On the subject of plumbing: some of the houses, not all, seem to have some kind of loo built in to them (in one house, the room I suspect of being the loo is called the "light closet.) The symbol I suspect makes it look like there is a bench all along one side of the room, with little ovals cut out of it. I do know water closets began to exist in houses around Jane Austen’s time, still, this folio is 1761, and that’s significantly earlier…

6

The large stone basins, which I guess are sinks, are always present in the scullery and, if there is one, in a place called the “wash room” which is always right next door to the laundry. The laundry itself never has these basins, and rarely a fireplace. The main kitchen does appear to have smaller sinks or taps.

In the houses from the 1750s, the kitchens and offices seem to be placed in wings of their own, to keep them away from the main house. In these designs, the Base floor of the house will have a couple of informal living rooms, such as a “Master’s Study” and “Common Sitting Room”, and a great deal of space devoted to the Butler’s pantry and other storage rooms, variously called china rooms, plate rooms, strong vaults, wine vaults, beer vaults, and strong beer vaults. The good living rooms–drawing room, saloon, dining room, library–will then be on the Principal floor, raised above ground. A lot of houses that have space devoted to all those ridiculous variety of vaults will only have six or fewer bedrooms, in the end, mostly in the Attic floor.

A “light closet” seems to be simply a closet (a small room) that has a window–as opposed to a closet without a window. Exciting news is that in the notes for one of the house plans–among those from the 1750s–Paine actually notes the “water closet.” The symbol I suspected of being the loo, actually is. You’ll all be excited to hear that the loos are always out of the way–usually around the kitchens and wash-house. I suspect that people lodged in the Attic floor still had chamber pots.