Designs for alterations to the basement, 1794

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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.
  - Buckland, Berkshire: (unexecuted) alterations for Sir John Throckmorton, 1794

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Reference number

SM 5/3/12

Purpose

Designs for alterations to the basement, 1794

Aspect

Plan of the Basement Floor / with the proposed alterations and additions

Scale

bar scale of 1/20 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, Sir John Throckmorton Bar^r, Larder, Pantry, Passage, Scullery, Dresser, Kitchen, Steward's / Room, Servants / Hall, Bed / Room, Powder^g/ Room, Butler

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and black, grey and blue washes on laid paper with six fold marks (492 x 391)

Hand

Soane office and Soane

Watermark

IV and fleur-de-lis

Notes

Soane designed two schemes for altering Buckland House but neither was executed. Soane first visited the site to survey the house on 14 May 1792, and in June he delivered drawings for alterations to the library. Two years later, the basement storey was surveyed on 25 February 1794 and designs were made for its alterations. This drawing is a design for the latter scheme, showing offices in the basement. Although these two schemes were not carried through, it has been speculated that Soane may have built the existing stables (P. Dean, p. 183).

Buckland House was built in 1755-8 by John Wood the Younger for Sir Robert Throckmorton. Soane's basement plan indicates the building's layout. The building had a broad frontage of 250 feet, with the central three-storey Palladian block linked by long passages to two octagonal terminal pavilions.

Madeleine Helmer, April 2012

Literature

P. Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate, 1999, p. 183; G. Tyack, S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Berkshire, 2010, p.215.

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).