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Notes
The principal stairwell on the ground floor is shown as executed. The communication between the office lobby (behind the stairwell) and the north-east corner room has been blocked up, unlike earlier plans. This development in the design probably is the result of Soane moving Mr Praed's rooms to the office court and appointing the north-east room as a billiard room. The first floor rooms are also shown as executed (drawing 67). The north-west room appears to be the principal bedroom, having a segmental partition attached to the west wall and partly surrounding the bed. The ceiling has an oval centre plan and paired arches at the east end. The other bedrooms are not as ornately decorated as this one, though all four of them include adjoining dressing rooms. The first floor has one water closet located near the secondary staircase, directly above the ground floor water closet.
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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).