Could I bild a modern house, in the style of an ancient Roman villa? How much would such a house cot to construct-would it be comfortable? I like the idea of the atrium, but having it open to the sky would not be a good idea in New England. However, the Romans adapted to the limate of Britain-presumably they wrked out OK. Any ideas?
The climate in Britain is much milder than the climate in New England. Here’s a comparison of the average weather conditions in Boston and London.
The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades is a faithful reproduction of the Villa dei Papiri in Pompeii. It’s recent renovation cost $275 million. Pacific Palisades is a Mediterranean climate, so it’d be tolerable, if a bit chilly during the winter. I’d toss a little bit of the $275 million into modern upgrades, with flush toilets and modern kitchen appliances.
I have worked in several homes in the Atlanta area built in the style of roman villas. I installed a large skylight in the atrium of one. Another one had exterior grade doors that opened onto a courtyard with pool in it.
$275 million seems a bit high – unless you’re talking about building it out of marble.
But really, ‘How much would it cost to build a Roman-style villa?’ is the same as asking, ‘How much does it cost to build a house?’ It depends on the location, the materials used to build it, how big it is, and so on.
Here’s a sample floor plan of a villa. Do you want something that looks like a villa? Or do you want something *styled after one? If the latter, you could use modern materials and building methods to create something in the spirit of a villa. In the French Quarter of New Orleans there are houses along similar lines. For example, there might be a shop in front with an open courtyard in the back and living quarters upstairs.
You ain’t gonna like the bedrooms, I’m warning you.
I’ve always wanted a Villa style house as well. I think you could do the open atrium as long as you heated the ground. Expensive, but it can be done. Or just not used it in the winter, which is what we do anyway with our decks/patios/etc.
Heating it might be expensive as well. Seems like a big block of a house would retain heat better.
Don’t bother clicking.
After six years, the link has gone dead.
Classicist nitpick: In Roman terminology, a villa is a country estate. The familiar style of a Roman house in the city with atrium etc would be called a domus.
I live in Britain. My garden is open to the sky. It’s not too cold to go out there. I wouldn’t try to live in the garden, but that’s why I have a house with doors and windows.
I know this thread is a zombie, but it seems like there is a fundamental misunderstanding - either mine or the OP’s (but I think the latter).
As I understand it, Roman homes with an atrium are basically just houses where the garden/yard is enclosed/encircled by the building. Instead of having a plot with the house in the middle with the house windows facing out to the garden, they had the house around the outside, with the windows facing inward to the enclosed garden/courtyard. There were still spaces where you could be indoors with the doors and windows shut to keep out the cold.
For low-rise buildings, an atrium might be more comfortable than a wrap-around garden, because there is shelter from the wind in all directions, but the summer sun can still shine in.
Well, the classic Roman domus with atrium did not have a garden at the centre of the atrium but rather an impluvium - a pool to collect rainwater gushing down from the surrounding roofs that would slope inwards towards the atrium. This pool would be surrounded by a roofed portico where you could sit, protected from the weather.
Here’s a picture of a classic atrium, with sloped roofs, impluvium and portico:
I’m in favor of building with your climate in mind. Building a home adapted to a Mediterranean climate of hot sunny dry summers and mild wet winters, outside of a such a climate, is like building a log cabin in Saudi Arabia.
Move to California, the Mediterranean, western Chile, Cape Town, or southern Australia. Then build your villa. It would make perfect sense there. The Romans were brilliant builders.
I’m using the term ‘garden’ in the loosest possible sense of the word - that is - the part of the property that is not indoors.
- That is, I think, approximately the same sense as ‘yard’ may be used loosely in US English. To me, a ‘yard’ is a paved outdoor space, enclosed by a wall or strong fence; if it has grass instead of paving (or even if it just has soil and weeds), it’s a ‘garden’ - even if no gardening ever takes place in it.
From what I can see (Pompeii, etc.) the classic Roman domus in the city is set up to use the plot available. In a time when there was not dedicated police force and thievery was not unusual, houses were built with a wall around. In the city, this basically fills the plot - with high walls, and usually one front door with a place for servant to be a guard when the door was open. There was the front atrium with an impluvium, and also a rear garden (peristylium). The rooms were built against the wall around these.
The walls had an added bonus, common in many of the cities of those days - the walls not only protected from thieves and aggression such as riots, but also from tax collectors. Ostentation was inside rather than outside, to dissuade avaracious local governments. External displays of wealth attracted tax collectors as well as thieves. Street frontage being at a premium, the front could have shop stalls or even workshops of the owner himself.
Perhaps a bit of irony, some wealthy citizen of Pompeii decorated his house with marvellous wall paintings - and the world remembers him 2,000 years later for his “beware of dog” sign.
Obviously there is no evidence left today, but presumption is the inside rooms had doors. Small charcoal brassierres could provide rudimentary heat; adequate for the Mediterranean climate, but not advisable elsewhere.
I think the design has advantages that would be desirable in the modern world - security and being overlooked by neighbours are problems that people deal with by installing alarms and hedges/fences/walls, when they could just as easily be part of the inherent design layout of the building - put the outdoor part inside the building, not around it.
There are also reasons it might not work so well - it generally requires more building materials for any given indoor floorspace, if the rooms are not clustered into a block, and modern buildings tend to be tall, which means no sunlight in the courtyard - this problem becomes more pronounced at higher latitudes but may be tolerable or even desirable in hotter climates - I stayed in a 16th century house in the old town in Granada that was 4 floors high and built around a central courtyard that was open to the sky - with internal balconies all overlooking it, and it was rather pleasant to be in the cool, fresh air in there.
But before planning a house the Roman way, keep in mind that the Romans did not design their houses with one particular thing in mind that’s the single most important factor in how we plan our residential areas today: The car. The Romans would build either villae, i.e. country estates outside any urban settlement, or domus (or even insulae - high-rise apartment blocks) within the city. And when they built in a city, architecture had to be compact to allow for a high population density and short commutes. Our suburban residential areas feature a lot of people living close together, but in a rather loose arrangement with a lot of open space (in the form of roads and gardens) in between houses. This is only feasible because cars make it possible to travel the distances between houses quickly. If you live in a suburban area, then neither a villa nor a domus will be really well-suited.
Good point - the older cities which evolved before cars were more compact. We see this still in our downtowns, where the smaller buildings often touch one another. When space is at a premium, that ten feet (or less) gap between buildings is wasted space. We also live in a fool’s paradise compared to earlier times, where we have large external-facing exposed glass windows and doors, and expect that they will be intact when we return home in the afternoon, that the police keep general thievery in check. You can see the older attitude in much older buildings, where ground floor windows often have bars - made into ornamental ironwork, but still a security feature; and more recent older small storefronts had those rolling metal shutters.
I suspect central courtyard was a fairly common design in most larger urban buildings before 1900, and security was a major concern. I’m reading a book on the history of the horse, and it mentions the manure problem of the late 1800’s (speaking of cities made for cars). Perhaps too, internal courtyards were more hygenic than street frontage in terms of what was just outside the gates. When cities go to the size of London or New York back then, the mounds of manure piled up in summer not unlike snow pushed to the roadside in winter. (And the emptying of chamber pots out the upper windows was a legendary feature of early European towns too…) At least the Romans were noted for planning town sewer systems.