Melton Constable stands in a park amid the undulations of the western part of Norfolk. It is a fine simple house of about the year 1680 (Stair Parts Fig. 131). The eaves cornice gives it its chief character ; the rest of the detail is correct, but the richly carved stair parts strikes the modern eye as being a little hackneyed; but this is the fault, not of the original architect but of his successors, who, if they did not copy this actual work, drew, one after the other, upon the same well of inspiration.
These examples serve to illustrate the progress of house design during the later years of the seventeenth century; they show how the fully developed classic manner had superseded the homely treatment of Jacobean times. Its further career of grandeur staircase and carved stair parts and stateliness demands a fresh chapter for its consideration.
The Design Influence of Work on Wood Staircases ot Bath
Stair Parts. Fig 184.Putterney Bridge Bath
Advocates of town-planning on architectural lines would do well to study the work of the two Woods on interior finishes in staircase designs with carved stair pats at Bath ; not only to see what they did, but how it has fared during the years that have passed since they did it. Pulteney Street was laid out with good residences treated with considerable skill, and its vista terminated with an important house, pleasant to look upon. But the character of the neighbourhood has changed, the houses are largely occupied by tenants of the working class, the mansion which closed the vista has fallen into decay, and the whole effect, from being fine, has become depressing. A single fine house reduced to mean uses has a squalid effect, but the squalor of a fine street decayed is far worse than that of one which never had high pretensions. Another example of the impossibility of looking far enough ahead to render one's ideas permanent is Pulteney Bridge, which led to the street of the same name (Fig. 184). The buildings which it once carried, and which gave it its character, became entirely out of accord with modern ideas and the whole structure was removed and replaced by something shore convenient but far less picturesque. An example of a row of houses dealt with as a piece of architecture, and one which has suffered little, if at all, from change, is the Royal Crescent (Stair Parts Fig. 185). It was designed by the younger Wood in 1769 interiors fitted with carved stair parts on main staircases.
The Staircases Fitted with Carved Stair Parts in the Stone Houses of Bath
Stair Parts Fig. 185. The Royal Crescent, Bath 1769
The abundance and excellent quality of the stone in the Bath district greatly facilitated the erection of new houses both in the city and the neighbourhood. It was susceptible of delicate detail, and lent itself admirably to the classic work then in vogue, which indeed could never have obtained a footing save through the medium of stone. Throughout the district there are to be found good houses of the time of the Woods, houses which are not large, which have no pretensions to vie with Prior Park, yet which are handsomely treated, and have had considerable skill and some learning bestowed upon their design. Such a one is Widcombe Manor House (Stair Parts Fig. 187), of which, however, it must be observed that it would be useless to undertake such a house unless one were prepared to spend a considerable amount for the sake of architectural effect. It is interesting to contrast with this product of the stone district a house in the adjoining county of Wilts. Reddish Manor, Broad Chalk (Stair Parts Fig. 186).
Stair Parts. Fig. 186.The Reddish Manor, Broad Chalk, Wilts
The walls here are of brick and the ornament is of stone, but apparently either the stone or the money gave out by the time the roof was reached, for the cornice and the pediment are of brick, and it is seen at once how impossible it was to carry out classic detail in the ordinary brick of the district, and with the limited skill of the ordinary workman. Nevertheless the result is attractive, and it prompts the somewhat disconcerting question, whether the fancy is not as much tickled by the efforts of the obscure and half-educated designer, as by the correct and skilful handling of the trained architect ? Accidents of colour and situation, the effects of time and weather, and above all, individuality of treatment, are as potent factors in impressing the staircase with its carved stair parts designs in imagination as book-learning and careful adherence to rules of proportion ; and in admiring the great houses of the eighteenth century, and Campbell, Gibbs, and the hierarchy of architects who produced them, one longs to meet some unexpected difficulty successfully surmounted, some state of things not contemplated in the books, which should prove that the man had an invention, an imagination, one might almost say a soul, of his own.
Stair Parts. Fig. 187.Widcombe Manor House, Bath