Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [115]
His solution was that ‘the offices [service rooms] be all placed together; attached to the house, yet still so situated as to be easily screened from sight, and consequently to be erected without any pretension to architecture’. If the establishment is large, he argued, ‘this mode is therefore too much like building two separate houses to have the accommodation of one.’105 Above all, if servants’ quarters were placed in the basement, direct access could be arranged upwards to the main rooms of the house. An added advantage was that the principal rooms would thereby have an unimpeded view from any aspect and the pleasure gardens allowed to encircle the whole building.
Nearly thirty years later, exactly the same issues arose at Humewood, designed by William White. White began work in all optimism, presenting a paper on it to the Royal Institute of British Architects that was published in their 1868/9 proceedings.106 Humewood was commissioned for the gloriously named Mr Wentworth Hume Dick who, like Sir Robert Gore-Booth, was an MP. His house was to be in the High Victorian castellar style, of which Mr White wrote: ‘I have endeavoured to incorporate the idea of a Scotch baronial hall with certain Irish peculiarities in the battlemented details – exhibiting the fusion of the good old Scotch and Irish families.’ It was, he noted, designed more for the summer recess and the shooting season than as a permanent residence. White repeated the same arguments put forward by Goodwin, in one part using language so close that he was possibly quoting from the text quoted above. He, too, was adamant that siting the servants’ quarters underground was the best solution for the servicing of the principal apartments. They must, he said, be vaulted in brick or stone in order to prevent the communication of noise and smells from the basement to the main rooms (an obsession of Victorian architects).
White also argued that the subterranean route was better for the overall design, although this was possibly a method of expressing status by siting the service quarters in relation to the main house in such a way as to raise the floors of the principal rooms used by the family. As White put it: ‘In the present instance however, it was of the greatest consequence to elevate the “living” part of the house above the cold and damps of the country, as well as to give a greater command of the magnificent prospects of the neighbourhood, and also to give greater importance to the exterior effect in a wild and mountainous district.’107
In the public debate after the paper was read, another architect, Professor Robert Kerr, was recorded as taking issue about the placing of the service quarters, because it was obvious ‘at a glance that the lawn must be overlooked from the servants hall and other such offices . . . Mr White’s clients we presume do not object to this, but many would object to it very much.’ He also noted the absence of a dinner lift: ‘[Mr White] prefers the use of a dinner stair, to which I make no objection, except that the servants might possibly think otherwise.’108
White replied, rather coldly to modern ears, that as it was necessary