Browse
Purpose
Notes
The building's layout is the same as Soane's designs for Hockerill (1786, q.v.) and Hethersett (1788, q.v.). However, this house is to a larger scale and its design and circulation are more refined, having a decorative front hall with curving corners, an integrated bowed end and a generous stairwell from which all the rooms communicate. The the eating room measures 22½ by 28 feet, the Library is 18 by 24 feet, and the front elevation, from floor to roof line, is 41 feet. Hockerill has an eating room measuring 15 feet 2 inches by 23 feet, a drawing room 18 feet 2 inches by 15 feet 2 inches, and a front elevation on only two storey's, measuring 23 feet 10 inches from floor to roof line.
Level
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).