In 1874, George Devey designed a simple cottage for the Rothschild family in Buckinghamshire that would eventually fool millions of people into believing they were living in the 16th century. This structure, known as Ascott House, utilized half-timbering and herringbone brickwork to create an image of medieval rusticity, yet it was actually a modern construction built with the latest materials of the Victorian era. The Tudor Revival style, which began to manifest in the United Kingdom during the latter half of the 19th century, was not a genuine attempt to replicate the architecture of the Tudor monarchs between 1485 and 1560. Instead, it was a romanticized interpretation of English vernacular architecture that had survived from the Middle Ages, blending elements of the Gothic Revival with a desire for a simpler, more domestic past. The style later became an influence elsewhere, especially the British colonies, where architects like Francis Petre in New Zealand adapted the style for the local climate, and Regent Alfred John Bidwell in Singapore pioneered what became known as the Black and White House. The earliest examples of the style originate with the works of such eminent architects as Norman Shaw and George Devey, in what at the time was considered Neo-Tudor design. Tudorbethan is a subset of Tudor Revival architecture that eliminated some of the more complex aspects of Jacobethan in favour of more domestic styles of Merrie England, which were cosier and quaint. It was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, which rejected mass production and drew on simple design inherent in aspects of its more ancient styles.
The Picturesque Village And The Country House
John Nash demonstrated a remarkably forward-looking selective appropriation of Tudor vernacular architecture in the group of nine cottages at Blaise Hamlet, built around 1810 to 1811 by a Bristol banker for his retired employees. These cottages featured fancy twisted brick chimney-stacks to make picturesque and comfortable middle-class homes, with some having thatched roofs at two levels in a completely unnecessary but very picturesque way. Nash published an illustrated book on the group, establishing a formula with a future that would influence generations of architects. In contrast with Nash's Blaise Hamlet, Dalmeny House near Edinburgh, built in 1817 for Archibald Primrose, 4th Earl of Rosebery, is a large stately home in a revival of the early Tudor palace style, drawing in particular from East Barsham Manor in Norfolk. At this time, the style was known as Old English, and considered especially appropriate for vicarages and rectories, partly because they were usually next to the church, which was likely to be Gothic, and because the larger windows patrons wanted were easier to work into the style than into a pointed Gothic. At this stage, it was essentially a style for the country rather than houses in towns. Tudor style was almost infinitely adaptable, particularly to low, spreading houses. After about 1850, Old English came to mean a rather different style based on vernacular architecture, although some Tudor features such as tall brick chimneys often remained. Examples of the Tudor or Perpendicular Gothic period also influenced new institutional buildings beginning in the 1820s, with architects like William Wilkins following the precedent of Wren and Hawksmoor in designing new quads for various Cambridge colleges in a historic mode.
In the early part of the 20th century, one of the exponents who developed the style further was Edwin Lutyens, who took the style away from what is generally understood as Tudor Revival creating a further highly personalized style of his own. At The Deanery in Berkshire, 1899, where the client was the editor of the influential magazine Country Life, details like the openwork brick balustrade, the many-paned oriel window and facetted staircase tower, the shadowed windows under the eaves, or the prominent clustered chimneys were conventional Tudor Revival borrowings, some of which Lutyens was to remake in his own style. This is Tudorbethan at its best, free in ground plan, stripped of cuteness, yet warmly vernacular in effect, familiar though new, eminently liveable. An anonymous reviewer for Country Life in 1903 wrote that the house had been planned so naturally that it seemed to have grown out of the landscape rather than to have been fitted into it. Another noted practitioner was George A. Crawley, a decorator and designer rather than an architect, who greatly expanded the original medieval hall house, Crowhurst Place in Surrey, firstly for himself and latterly for Consuelo Vanderbilt. The result, remarkable in its own right, saw Crawley add extensions, chimneys, gables, linenfold panelling and large amounts of half-timbering. Martin Conway, writing in Country Life, considered Crawley's reconstruction gave the remains of the original manor, a beauty far greater than was ever theirs in the days of its newness. Ian Nairn, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, in the 1971 revised Surrey Pevsner Buildings of England, note the sense of escapism which inspired much of the Tudor Revival, calling Crowhurst, an extreme example of the English flight from reality around the 1914 to 18 war.
The Suburban Mass Production And The Pub
Following the First World War, many London outer suburbs had developments of houses in the style, all reflecting the taste for nostalgia for rural values. In the first half of the 20th century, increasingly minimal Tudor references for instant atmosphere in speculative construction cheapened the style. The writer Olive Cook had this debased approach firmly in her sights when she attacked, the rash of semi-detached villas, bedizened with Tudor gables, mock half-timber work, rough cast and bay windows of every shape which disfigures the outskirts of all our towns. It was also copied in many areas of the world, including the United States and Canada. New York City suburbs such as Westchester County, New York and Englewood and Teaneck, New Jersey feature particularly dense concentrations of Tudor Revival construction from this period. Brewery companies designed improved pubs, some in a mock Tudor style called Brewer's Tudor. The style was captured in John Betjeman's 1937 poem Slough, where bald young clerks gather. The late 20th century has seen a change in the faithfulness of emulation of the style, since in a modern development it is common to have only a few basic floor plans for buildings, these combined with variations in interior surface treatment and in the exterior in rooflines and setbacks to provide a visual variety to the street view. Owing to the smaller lots employed in modern developments, especially in the Western US, Tudor Revival may be placed directly next to an unrelated style such as French or Italian Provincial, resulting in an eclectic mix. The style has also been deployed for commercial developments, the architectural historian Anthony Quiney describes the Broadway Centre in the London borough of Ealing, dressed out with brick and tile, arches, gables and small window panes, all to put a smile on a friendly face - the mask of tradition.
The Half-Timbered Illusion And The Modern Material
From the 1880s onward, Tudor Revival concentrated more on the simple but quaintly picturesque Elizabethan cottage, rather than the brick and battlemented splendours of Hampton Court or Compton Wynyates. Tudor Revival houses are dissimilar to the timber-framed structures of the originals, in which the frame supported the whole weight of the house. Their modern counterparts consist of bricks or blocks of various materials, stucco, or even simple studwall framing, with a lookalike frame of thin boards added on the outside to mimic the earlier functional and structural weight-bearing heavy timbers. An example of this is the simple cottage style of Ascott House in Buckinghamshire, designed by Devey for the Rothschild family, who were among the earliest patrons and promoters of this style. Simon Jenkins suggests that Ascott, a half-timbered, heavily gabled, overgrown cottage, proves the appeal of Tudor to every era and condition of England. Devey's work at St Alban's Court and elsewhere incorporated other features of the Tudor Revival style such as hung tiles and patterned brickwork. At St Alban's he also made use of rag-stone footings to create the impression of a Tudor mansion built on the stone of medieval foundations. A very well-known example of the idealized half-timbered style is Liberty & Co. department store in London, which was built in the style of a vast half-timbered Tudor mansion. The store specialized, among other goods, in fabrics and furnishings by the leading designers of the Arts and Crafts movement. In modern structures, usually on estates of private houses, a half-timbered appearance is obtained by applied decorative features over the real structure, typically wood stud framing or concrete block masonry. A combination of boards and stucco is applied to obtain the desired appearance, here seen in the image to the right. To minimize maintenance, the boards are now commonly made of uPVC faux wood, plastic or fibre reinforced cement siding with a dark brown or wood effect finish. In the United States, the style is often further modified by painting the timbers colors such as blue or green. The Tudor Revival style was most popular for new American homes in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, it is rarely considered for residential construction in that country as Italian, Mediterranean, and French villa style homes have superseded them in popularity.
The Interior Escape And The Monk Cell
The interiors of the Tudor style building have evolved considerably along with the style, often becoming truer to the replicated era than were the first examples of the revival style, where the style rarely went far indoors. At Ascott House, Devey's great masterpiece constructed throughout the last twenty years of the 19th century, the interior was remodelled thirty years later. The Tudor Revival style was considered passé and was replaced by the fashionable Curzon Street Baroque sweeping away the inglenook fireplaces and heavy oak panelling. The large airy rooms are in fact more redolent of the 18th century than the 16th. Cragside is slightly more true to its theme, although the rooms are very large, some contain Tudor style panelling, and the dining room contains are monumental inglenook, but this is more in the style of Italian Renaissance meets Camelot than Tudor. While in the cottages at Mentmore the interiors are no different from those of any lower middle-class Victorian small household. An example of a Tudor Revival house where the exterior and interior were treated with equal care is Old Place, Lindfield, West Sussex. The property, comprising an original house of c.1590, was developed by the stained glass designer Charles Eamer Kempe from the 1870s. The architect George Frederick Bodley described the rooms as a series of pictures and an article in Country Life asking whether anything could be more English in character than Old Place, was written when much of the house was barely 10 years old. In some of the larger Tudor style houses the Tudor great hall would be suggested by the reception hall, often furnished as a sitting or dining room. Large wooden staircases of several flights were often prominently positioned, based on Jacobean prototypes. It is this mingling of styles that has led to the term Jacobethan which resulted in houses such as Harlaxton Manor which bore little if any resemblance to a building from either period. Hall notes the influence of Burghley House and Wollaton Hall, fused with ideas drawn from Continental architecture of the seventeenth and 18th centuries.
The Extreme Tudor Taste And The Satire
More often it is in the Tudor style houses of the very early 20th century that a greater devotion to the Tudor period is found, with appropriate interior layout, albeit coupled with modern-day comforts. This can be seen in older upscale neighbourhoods where the lots are sufficiently large to allow the house to have an individual presence, despite variations in the style of neighboring houses. Whether of older or recent origin, the appearance of solid beams and half-timbered exterior walls is only superficial. Artificially aged and blackened beams are constructed from light wood, bear no loads, and are attached to ceilings and walls purely for decoration, while artificial flames leap from wrought iron fire-dogs in an inglenook often a third of the size of the room in which they are situated. Occasionally, owners sought to replicate more closely the conditions of Tudor living; an example were the Moynes at Baliffscourt in West Sussex, a house which Clive Aslet describes as the most extreme - and most successful - of all Tudor taste country houses. Lord Moyne's wife, Evelyn, a society hostess, employed the amateur architect Amyas Philips to create a house inspired by the medieval Baliffscourt Chapel which stood on the site. The cloister-like design required visitors to leave the house and access their bedrooms via external staircases. Chips Channon, the diarist and politician described the bedrooms themselves as decorated to resemble the cell of a rather pansy monk. The novelist E. F. Benson satirised the style in his book Queen Lucia, the famous smoking-parlour, with rushes on the floor, a dresser ranged with pewter tankards, and leaded lattice-windows of glass so antique that it was practically impossible to see out of them...sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read.