evadri

Okay, this is mainly me being lazy (which I will have to get over very soon), but does anyone known anything about Victorian mansions? As in architecture, furnishings, layout...
Or any books or websites I could check out.
thanks, Ev.

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casperthesheet

Well, I'll try to offer you some information but I'm not sure how helpful it will be. I used to live in an older house and here are somethings that I found out about it.

1. Under the main stairs was a small "storage" room. I found out that back in the day when someone would die they placed the body in the area because it was always cold, cold enough to keep the body "fresh" until the showing.

2. The height and detail in the baseboard determined how rich a family was.

3. We had two staircases leading to the second floor. One was in the main lobby and the second was in the kitchen. Everyone used to staircase in the lobby except for the servants. They had to use the staircase off the kitchen.

That's all that I can think of right now. If anything else comes up I'll be sure to let you know.

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evadri

That's great, thanks. Especially about the staircases, because I've already written two

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Nickie

I can also tell you that the servants in those days slept in the attic or upper level rooms, while the kitchens were often in the basement.



Nickie

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Stewart

You are right; it's very lazy.

Anyway, there's a number of Victorian resources on the internet if you take the time to search them out. These are full of people researching things such as society, culture, food, environment, living, economy, politics, industry, etc. for your required period.

Also, for books: aside from the obvious Victorian non-fiction, read Dickens and, if interested, Michel Faber's excellent The Crimson Petal and the White.

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Philo

From an architectural perspective, Victorian design is a reaction to the plain colonial styles that pre-date Victorian Architecture and attempts to recreate the organic feeling of European mansions and castles, that grew in a more haphazard way. It comes on the heels of the Gothic Revival that started in England, spurned on by Ruskin's "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and is also a reaction to that style by trying to warm it up and make it more Romantic, Gothic being more suited to religious and public architecture.

With that in mind, Victorian buildings were designed to break down large flat walls and simple window and door patterns so that while similar themes tied everything together, no two views of the building were the same. Giving rise to towers, bay windows, cantilevers and brackets, curved top widows, arches, complex porches and balconies, complex plan shapes and roof lines, and even complex patterns and textures on the walls, whether made of differing colors and shapes of stone or decorative wooden shingles.

Inside, the layouts were inspired by the same ideas. The more trim, door and window casings, moldings, wall papers, etc… the better. Large rectilinear rooms are not as common, and rooms with softer forms, inglenooks, niches, built-in cabinets and the occasionally hidden door are more popular. Servants quarters in the attic were often only clad with boards or plastered and white washed. The servant stairs were similarly simplified. In my own house, the two stairs end at the same spot and its very clear when you stand at the top, which way you would have gone based on your station in life.

Another point that I think is important: Mansions and houses in this style were normally placed at the high point on the lot to accentuate the height and to give it that regal look (castles were built on hilltops). My own house is set high and then the earth was bermed around it locally to give the same effect.

Verkleefd

I think that the best insight to Victorian houses one can find is in the books themselves. There's quite a lot of description on Victorian-Edwardian life in John Galsworthy's novels, specially The Forsyte Saga, consisting of half a dozen novels with interludes. There's a lot of description to the great Victorian houses of the late XVIII and early XIX centuries, the rooms, the decoration, etc.

Nimbus1944

If you do a Google Images request for Victorian Interior, you'll find many photos of the elaborate (and often cluttered!) rooms of the day.

"Bob Vila's This Old House" (NY: Dutton, 1981) is entirely on the renovation of a Victorian, and so covers a lot of architectural minutia.

Andrew Jackson Downing was an American architect whose books in the early Victorian days played a big part in the gingerbread generation of homes. Some are in reprint by Dover.

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