Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Design for an unidentified villa with compass-drawn rooms in a Classical style, 70 by 67 feet, c.1806 (2)

Browse

Purpose

Design for an unidentified villa with compass-drawn rooms in a Classical style, 70 by 67 feet, c.1806 (2)

Notes

The three-bay front of Dance's unidentified villa has a segmental bowed centre (with an oval entrance hall behind it) answered by a wider segmental bow on the garden front with a tripartite window that lights the drawing room. This runs the width of the house and is composed of three circles, two of 22 foot diameter either side of one of 36 foot diameter which has four alcoves framed by columns, while the ends have two plain alcoves each. The alcoves were probably intended for sculpture. Between the hall and drawing room is a geometrical stair within an apsidal-ended compartment. Thus the plan is essentially that of a six-part villa designed for entertainment with half of the ground floor taken up by the drawing room that gives on to a dining room 39.0 by 22.0 feet with segmental ends. The remaining part of the plan is given to a 'Library or Bedroom' that is the only room with four corners, a dressing room with apse, an irregularly planned water closet, and a secondary stair with an apsidal end. There are ten alcoves in all, the left-hand external wall is windowless. The area of the ground floor is 4690 square feet, the kitchen and other offices are in the basement and there is a bedroom floor.

The strong geometry of this villa design links it to the unexecuted designs for a chapel at Stratton, 1806, of which one of the plans ([SM D1/7/4]) is strikingly similar in handling and medium to [SM D2/8/8].

Level

Group

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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 Design for an unidentified villa with compass-drawn rooms in a Classical style, 70 by 67 feet, c.1806 (2)