Design 'No 1' for alterations and offices

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Worlingham Hall, Suffolk: (unexecuted) alterations and offices for Robert Sparrow, c. 1786

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Reference number

SM 4/3/13

Purpose

Design 'No 1' for alterations and offices

Aspect

Ground floor plan; front elevation; and rear elevation

Scale

bar scale of 1/11 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

N^o1 Worlingham Hall. Design for the alterations & offices, and plan labelled (Soane): Vestibule / 34' by 24', Library / 18' by 24', Greenhouse, Garden room / under it an Icehouse, Withdrawing room / 25'6" by 31'6", Breakfast room / 24' by 18', Great staircase, Eating Room / 25'6 by 31'6, Back staircase, Gentleman's room / 18' by 15', passage to the offices, Butlers pantry & plate closet, court, mud room, bakehouse & scullery / 18'6 by 11', area, Kitchen / 18' by 26', Larder / 9' by 18, Passage, Kitchen Court, washouse / 19' by 13'6", Laundry / 19' by 13'6", Brewhouse / 20'6 by 13'6, Entrance for carts, For wood and coals &c, Cleaning / Shoes &c, passage, Housekeeper / 18' by 20', area, Store Room / 12' feet sq^r, Servants Hall / 19' by 19'

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and grey and pink washes, on laid paper with one fold mark (674 x 504)

Hand

Soane and Soane office

Watermark

J Whatman and fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche with W below

Notes

In 1786, Soane made five alternative designs for alterations and additions to Worlingham Hall. None of these schemes was executed. This drawing shows one of the proposed designs.

Pink wash on the plan indicates proposed building work. Soane's design shows the entrance vestibule altered to have columns framing a square centre, and the walls thickened and blind doors introduced to enforce a symmetry within the space. A staircase spans the back wall of the entrance hall. The rear nine-bay elevation has two two-storey ranges linked by a single-storey range in the centre. This low middle range not only breaks up the elevation but also allows for first-storey windows shedding into the stairwell.

The proposed offices are on axis with the house and surrounding a semicircular court. As shown in the elevation, the offices are one storey and partly obscured by a curving screen wall. The elevation is made symmetrical by a brick wall extending to the west and terminating in a pavilion. A greenhouse and garden room are included to the west, and an ice house is proposed. Pencil alterations to the drawing show a round-headed entrance in the garden wall.

Level

Drawing

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).