The style of architecture in which the great majority of country houses, and very many town houses, from the cottage to the mansion, have been built during the past fifteen years, is a very great improvement upon the nameless mode—for which no better title could be invented than the “factory style”—which prevailed in house architecture during great part of last century and the first half of this. And it is a yet greater improvement upon the falsification of that simple though sordid way of building, by attempting to change its misery into magnificence by “compo” mockeries of stone construction and a style of ornament created to express the thickness of the wall or the weight of roof of a Renaissance palace. Most persons are contented with describing the improved mode as Old English, fancying that it is a real return to the way in which houses were built in the reign of Elizabeth or James or thereabouts. But there is a notable distinction between ancient and modern “Old English.” It is this: the “variety” in form which is of the essence of the last was but the accident of the first. Whitehall and the Parthenon are not more simply symmetrical in their masses than are many of the finest specimens of Early English domestic architecture; and the “variety” which we moderns suppose we are copying is, in nearly all cases, either the result of change of plan in the process of building, or of subsequent additions by which the original symmetry was sacrificed. That the sacrifice was often without loss, and often even a gain—as such a sacrifice could never be in the case of a Greek or Renaissance building—is owing to the fact that domesticity is the central thought and expression of the one kind of architecture and public ostentation of the other. Accordingly, the keynote of an Early English house is its stack of chimneys, upon which it was considered impossible to lavish too much ornament. From the cottage of the Sussex labourer to the great nobleman’s mansion—such as that most exquisite of all existing specimens of Tudor building, “Compton in the Hole”—the chimneys are the things which first attract the eye and delight it longest; whereas the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance house is heartily ashamed of its smoke, and has never yet succeeded thoroughly in dealing with its disgrace. Symmetry, then, in the old country house was looked upon as good; but convenience and comfort, and the expression of convenience and comfort, better. Now, in a house well and deliberately planned for the convenience of any household, large or small, the ground-plan and elevation will be naturally simple and symmetrical; simplicity, too, is economical, and economy a part of domesticity. Accordingly, the great Tudor mansions and palaces of England, the builders of which could have best afforded to pay for the supposed charm of “variety,” are, for the most part, the simplest in plan and elevation; while it is in the ill-planned and often-added-to village inn or rectory that the vagaries of “variety,” so alluring to the modern mind, are almost exclusively found.

In Old English architecture this variety is a very real though accidental beauty. It has the double charm of intensifying the primary expression of domesticity by the very sense of the sacrifice which has been made to it, and of giving the building, however small, a touch of historical character. But what if these beauties of the old architecture are sought to be obtained in the modern by sacrifices of convenience, economy, and domesticity, and by a deliberate planning of structural “after-thoughts,” or subsequent necessities, from the beginning! What if a house, full of small and uncomfortable rooms connected, or rather isolated, by mazes of dark staircases, landings, and passages, has been manifestly built at one blow, and at twice the cost at which a simple and symmetrical and scarcely less—nay, to the initiated, more—beautiful house of the same period of architecture might have been built, without the sacrifice of any modern convenience? Surely, if the devil were an architect his “favourite sin” would be this kind of “cottage of gentility.”

The “variety” of a real Old English house is not only nearly always the outcome of some convenience or necessity discovered or arising after the first building of it, but is nearly always obviously so. Some little difference of style not too great to break harmony, will indicate a difference of date; or it will be shown by some infraction of the lines of the original building. The library or parlour which cuts off a return of the label of the pantry window is manifestly an addition. But it would be too ridiculous to copy such proofs of accident and alteration into a nineteenth-century rectory, villa, or mansion; and the consequence is, that to an understanding eye its variety is often in appearance, as it is in reality, mere imbecility aping the movements of reason.

There is no real anachronism in the revival of the ordinary details of Old English house architecture, though there is sometimes in that of the material. The “half-timbered” wall belongs only to times and places in which bricks and tiles are not to be had, and in which abundance of the best oak timber is. But hooded gables, deep cornices, bracketed bays, weather-tiled walls, the projection of upper over lower stories, and almost all the other charming features of the mode, have sound reasons of use which hold as good now as they did in the year 1600; and in these reasons alone consists their architectural charm. The characteristic Old English chimney—the most ornamental feature of the style—has its full justification in use; the loading of the top with projecting layer after layer of bricks, laid even or notch-wise, forming that security against hurricane which is so often sought, in the “factory” style, by the one or more long iron rods which agreeably break the sky-line of many modern mansions. Even the scalloped tile, which so often replaces the square in old weather-tiled walls, has its utilitarian purpose—a saving of material; the greatest breadth of the scallop being superposed upon the juncture of the tiles below, so as to protect it from wet. The projection, in a long low house of the modest rectory or farmhouse type, of the bedroom story over the basement is the feature farthest of all from being merely ornamental. In such a house more space was usually wanted for bedrooms than for living-rooms and offices, and a very moderate projection of the upper story supplies this additional space.