Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Survey drawings, 29-30 September 1790 (11)

Browse

Purpose

Survey drawings, 29-30 September 1790 (11)

Notes

The overall survey plan (drawing 1) shows the house as 65 feet wide and 55 feet deep with entrances on three sides - west, east and south. On the north side are the offices that with the walled enclosures, run for about 200 feet by 130 feet. The labels on the basement plan (drawing 2) are for beer and wine cellars. The plan of the ground floor (drawing 3) shows four reception rooms, hall, vestibule and stair and, for example, that the entrance lobby on the south side is now a water closet. On the verso, is a design for the west front by Soane now superseded (see drawing 13 recto). The bedchamber plan shows eight rooms, six with beds, one identified as a dressing room and another unlabelled. The plan of the second floor is missing.

The five-bay west front (drawing 5) has a two-storey (and basement) projecting bay with balustrade on either side of a pedimented Doric doorway with a panelled door with fanlight. A pediment crowns the centre three bays; the second floor windows, above the bays, are Diocletian. The seven-bay east front (drawing 6) has a pedimented, slightly projecting three-bay centre and a doorway with a segmental pediment on scrolled brackets and a shouldered lintel, and with a glazed door; above at second floor level is a Diocletian window. The south front (drawing 7) has a two-storey (and basement) projecting bay (by 3 feet 2½ inches) with balustrade on either side of a deeper (6 feet 11 inches) two-storey bay with balustrade, and with a doorway with a scrolled pediment. All fronts have 'strip' quoins to the corners and ball finials to pediments and the corners of the parapets. Soane's remodelling of the fronts left the east front unchanged. Drawing 8 is for the plan five-bay north elevation to the offices.

The east-west section (drawing 9) with the projecting south porch on the right and the north offices and on the left. Drawing 10 is for the upper floor over the offices and includes a cistern, rooms for staff, among them the plumber, 'cheese chamber', pigeon loft and apple store (see also drawing 13 verso for plan of ground floor with additions, dated February 1791).

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 Survey drawings, 29-30 September 1790 (11)