Tudor Revival architecture
Tudor Revival architecture, also known as mock Tudor in the UK, first manifested in domestic architecture in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century. Based on revival of aspects that were perceived as Tudor architecture, in reality it usually took the style of English vernacular architecture of the Middle Ages that had survived into the Tudor period.[1]
"Mock Tudor" redirects here. For the Richard Thompson album, see Mock Tudor (album).
The style later became an influence elsewhere, especially the British colonies. For example, in New Zealand, the architect Francis Petre adapted the style for the local climate. In Singapore, then a British colony, architects such as Regent Alfred John Bidwell 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.
Identification[edit]
Today, the term 'Tudor architecture' usually refers to buildings constructed during the reigns of the first four Tudor monarchs, between about 1485 and 1560, perhaps best exemplified by the oldest parts of Hampton Court Palace. The historian Malcolm Airs, in his study The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History, considers the replacement of the private castle by the country house as "the seat of power and the centre of hospitality" to be "one of the great achievements of the Tudor age".[2] Subsequent changes in court fashion saw the emergence of Elizabethan architecture among the elite, who built what are now called prodigy houses in a distinctive version of Renaissance architecture.[3] Elizabeth I herself built almost nothing,[4] her father having left over 50 palaces and houses.[5] Outside court circles styles were much more slow-moving, and essentially "Tudor" buildings continued to be built, eventually merging into a general English vernacular style.
When the style was revived, the emphasis was typically on the simple, rustic, and the less impressive aspects of Tudor architecture, imitating in this way medieval houses and rural cottages. Although the style follows these more modest characteristics, items such as steeply pitched-roofs, half-timbering often infilled with herringbone brickwork, tall mullioned windows, high chimneys, jettied (overhanging) first floors above pillared porches, dormer windows supported by consoles, and even at times thatched roofs, gave Tudor Revival its more striking effects.[6]
Interiors[edit]
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".[54] 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.[e][60] 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.[61]
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 eighteenth centuries".[62]
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".[63] 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".[64] 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".[65]
Petwood Hotel, Woodall Spa, England (1905)
