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Notes
The fourth design (drawings 16 to 19) is a variant of the three previous designs (drawings 4 to 14). As in Design No III (drawing 14), the round picture room is aligned with doors to the principal staircase, entrance hall, anteroom and breakfast room, creating an enfilade that spans the length of the building. The proposed stairwell and breakfast room collectively project in three bays on the north front. The library chimney-piece is on the east wall of the room and facing the bookcase for folios.
As opposed to earlier designs (drawings 7 to 14), the proposed staircase accesses both the basement and first floor. The first floor has two bedrooms and two dressing rooms. The basement retains the same layout as in design No I (drawing 7), but pushed north so that the central passage aligns with the centre of the existing building. Mr Hamilton's dressing room is adjacent to the bath room, which also has the same design as in drawing 7.
The attic has six bedrooms and is accessed via the secondary staircase in the existing house. An inscription in pencil notes that the ceiling is 8 feet high; the lines of the hipped roof are added in pencil.
Pencil marks on the drawings indicate communications between the rooms; these were probably added when Soane presented the drawings to his client.
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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 Presentation drawings for design No IV, executed design, March 1789 (4)
- [16] Presentation drawing for design No IV, executed design, Basement Floor, March 1789
- [17] Presentation drawing for design No IV, executed design, Principal Floor, March 1789
- [18] Presentation drawing for design No IV, executed design, Bedchamber Floor, March 1789
- [19] Presentation drawing for design No IV, executed design, Attic Floor, March 1789