Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Working drawings for the offices, 8 May 1790 (4)

Browse

Purpose

Working drawings for the offices, 8 May 1790 (4)

Notes

Drawings for the offices were sent to the client on 4 May 1790. Drawings 2 to 5 are probably copies of the design. Soane's Journal No 1 records that working drawings were taken to the site on 12 May, perhaps drawings 2 to 5. As drawing 6 shows, however, these are not the final built design though the layout is the same as the executed version.

The offices extend east from the house. The plans on drawings 2 and 3 are unlabelled but if one may assume that the building contains the same ground floor rooms as Soane's labelled preliminary design (drawing 1), the central passage leads to a servant's hall and secondary staircase before descending a quarter-flight of stairs past the housekeeper's room and then out to a covered passage that leads to a single-storey range with a kitchen, scullery and larders. Upstairs, the first floor has six rooms resembling servants' bedrooms, each having a chimney-piece, and another staircase to the attic. Only the middle two bays have an attic floor. On the south elevation, the first floor windows on four bays are surrounded by round-headed arched recesses. On both south and north elevations, the centre two bays have a string course between the first and attic storeys, and a cornice above.

Level

Group

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).  


Contents of Working drawings for the offices, 8 May 1790 (4)