Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
At this point came Nesfield’s Kinmel Park. Shaw and other advanced
architects must have been aware of the character of the designs for this
house from 1870 or 71, even though it was neither shown at the Royal
Academy nor published then, and took some four years to complete. Kinmel
is much more complicated stylistically than Nesfield’s Kew lodge of
1866-7, but it offers the next step in the development of the new Queen
Anne mode. At first sight it might appear to be related rather to Second
Empire work, for the main block on the entrance side is symmetrical,
high-roofed, and dominated by a bold central pavilion. Moreover, the
detailing of the red-brick façades with their profuse light-coloured
stone trim is almost as French of Louis XIII’s time as it is English of
Queen Anne’s day. The garden front, which is carefully ordered but not
symmetrical, and the service wing to the south, much more loosely
composed and with a profusion of small-paned double-hung sash-windows
and dormers, are more definitely English and also more original.
Webb had been using such windows and even approaching the Late Stuart
vernacular in his houses for a year or two before Kinmel was begun. This
was most evident at Trevor Hall (Figure 25), built at Oakleigh Park near
Barnet in Hertfordshire in 1868-70, for that modest country house was
quite symmetrical in design although almost devoid of any sort of
‘period’ detail, whether Gothic or Late Stuart. To more acclaim, Webb
had also been responsible for designing with William Morris a little
earlier, in 1866 and in 1867, the Armoury in St James’s Palace and the
Refreshment Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former,
particularly, is a very original masterpiece of nineteenth-century
decoration, hardly at all related to the contemporary High Victorian
Gothic, yet reflecting the eighteenth century only as regards the
treatment of the wainscoting and the door and window casings (which may
be of eighteenth-century date). The Refreshment Room is also very fine
and now accessible to the public (Plate 97B).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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