Browse
Reference number
Purpose
Aspect
Scale
Signed and dated
- 1802-08
Medium and dimensions
Hand
Watermark
Notes
Design E has an oval drawing room at its apex, flanked by an eating room and library that are stretched octagons with (internal) apsidal ends. These three rooms give on to a central staircase hall with a reverse imperial stair, that is, a circular geometric stair that rises in twin flights and becomes a single central flight at the first floor level. The offices are lateral wings with pavilion ends. The striking plan shape of the house recalls (without its wings) Robert Adam's plan of 1791 for Walkinshaw House, Renfrewshire with its Neo-Classical exterior (SM Adam vol.31, 56-62). Adam's plan, though, is triangular while Dance's is more lozenge-like.
The elevation, with drop-and Tudor-arched openings and battlemented parapets, shows the result of Dance's unconventional, compressed villa plan, its curved and straight-sided form modelled by receding and advancing planes that give the building both movement and gravitas.
See also Dance's early design for a villa on a triangular plan (Juvenilia).
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).