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Soane's additions to Cuffnells consisted mostly of a semicircular porch, a library (36 by 23 feet), an anti-library and a conservatory as well as bedrooms and dressing rooms on the first floor for which variant designs were given. The 'lawn' or garden front to the south-east was given round-arched first floor windows while those on the ground floor were rectangular and set in arched recess surrounds; the conservatory continued the round-arched theme. An engraved plate in The Beauties of England and Wales, 1805 and also an undated photocopy of a mid-20th century perspective of the garden front (SM information file) suggest that all of the windows became square-headed and without arched recesses and that the portico was omitted. The balconies to the upper windows became a continuous verandah and underneath each window was a rectangular plaque. A conservatory was built without arched openings but with larger, tripartite, doors at each end. Dorothy Stroud (Soane Museum Inspectress) visited Cuffnells in 1948 and her card index shows, for example, that the walls were clad with white mathematical tiles and the plaques were of Coade stone. The house was demolished in 1957.
Literature. P.Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate , 1999, p.186; Legacies of British Slavery database, UCL: www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs
Jill Lever, November 2012
Level
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).