Up and Down Stairs - Jeremy Musson [116]
The plan for Humewood shows the footman’s room convenient to the hall, the butler’s pantry and the plate room near there too, and the servants’ hall close to the kitchen. The laundry is at one extremity, and the stables stand separately. The servants’ bedrooms were principally above the kitchen, thus effectively on the first floor and therefore not too damp, with the nurse and nurserymaid sleeping in the nursery wing. Further accommodation was provided in the stable block.110 However ingenious White’s architecture, his defence of the basement solution seems very backward-looking.
There was clearly an obsessive interest on the part of both architects and patrons in the accommodation of servants and the supporting kitchen offices, stables and yards. Careful design and layout were essential to facilitate the multiplicity of duties expected of domestic servants in a nineteenth-century house.
In his Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1833), J.C. Loudon described the ordered arrangements of rationally planned domestic services, even for a modest country villa: ‘The [butler’s] pantry is near the dining-room and commands the porch. The servants’ hall is beyond the door leading to the yard, and has the effect of being detached from the house, though really within it.’111 This separation was necessary for both efficiency and cleanliness:
The kitchen is arranged with the same advantages; the door opposite the pantry is only in use for the service of dinner. The scullery is wholly removed from the house. The laundry and wash-house are yet more retired, and immediately under the inspection of the housekeeper . . . The knife and shoe room adjoins the servants’ hall.112
The Gentleman’s House, or How to Plan English Residences from the Parsonage to the Palace (1864) by Professor Robert Kerr offers a good understanding of the evolving approaches to the design of servants’ halls and sleeping quarters in the mid to late Victorian period. Kerr outlined the history of the English country house and advised on designing the ideal dwelling, dividing it into ‘the first division: the family apartments’, the second division or state rooms, and the third division: the domestic offices.113
He considered privacy to be of prime importance in the country house:
whether in a small house or a large one, let the family have free passage-way without encountering the servants unexpectedly; and let the servants have access to all their duties without coming unexpectedly upon the family or visitors. On both sides this privacy is highly valued. It is a matter also for the architect’s care that the outdoor work of the domestics shall not be visible from the house or grounds, or the windows of their Offices overlooked.
At the same time it is equally important that the walks of the family shall not be open to view from the Servants’ Department. The Sleeping-rooms of the domestics, also, have to be separated both internally and externally from those of the family, and indeed separately approached.114
This separation is in contrast to earlier notions of the household as a family or community in itself, however alien that might seem today.
‘The idea which underlies all is simply this. The family constitute one community: the servants another. Whatever may be their mutual regard and confidence as dwellers under the same roof, each class is entitled to shut its doors upon the other and be alone.’ He observed of the eighteenth-century model, considered in the last chapter: ‘In the Classic model privacy is certainly less,’ whereas, perhaps oddly, he took the view that ‘in the Medieval model, privacy is never difficult of accomplishment.’115 Kerr clearly regarded the planning of the service quarters as a matter of the utmost importance, with efficiency the primary