Prodigy house
[3] Many of the grandest were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm.
[7] The hosts were expected to house the monarch in style, and provide sufficient accommodation for about 150 travelling members of the court, for whom temporary buildings might need to be erected.
[10] A characteristic was the large area of glass – a new feature that superseded the need for easily defended external walls and announced the owners' wealth.
By the end of the Elizabethan period this sprawling style, essentially developing the form of late medieval buildings like Knole in Kent (which has a total of 7 courtyards), and many Oxbridge colleges, was giving way to more compact high-rising structures with a coherent and dramatic structural plan, making the whole form of the building visible from outside the house.
The common E- and H-shaped plans, and in effect incorporating an imposing gatehouse into the main facade, rather than placing it on the far side of an initial courtyard, increased the visibility of the most grandly decorated parts of the exterior.
But, with a few exceptions such as Kirby Hall,[17] columns were restricted to such individual features; in other buildings, such as the Bodleian Library, similar "Towers of the Five Orders" sit at the centre of frankly Gothic facades.
[18] The heavily illustrated books on ornament by the Netherlander Hans Vredeman de Vries (1560s onwards) and German Wendel Dietterlin (1598) supplied much of the Northern Mannerist decorative detail such as strapwork.
The parlour was another name for a more private room, and increasingly there were a number of these in larger houses, where the immediate family would now usually eat,[20] and where they might retreat entirely in cold weather.
Henry was a prolific builder himself, though little of his work survives, but the prudent Elizabeth (like her siblings) built nothing herself, instead encouraging her courtiers to "...build on a scale which in the past would have been seen as a dynastic threat.
[27] With some other Châteaux of the Loire Valley, the Château de Chambord of François I of France (built 1519–1547) had many features of the English houses, and certainly influenced Henry VIII's Nonsuch Palace.
[29] Sites were chosen for their potential convenience for royal progresses, rather than being the centre of landholdings, which were looked after by agents, or any local political powerbase.
[32] Mentmore Towers, by Joseph Paxton, is an enormous revival of a Smythson-type style, and like Westonbirt House (Lewis Vulliamy, 1860s) and Highclere Castle (by Sir Charles Barry 1839–42, used for filming Downton Abbey), is something of an inflated Wollaton.
The north fronts of The Vyne and Lyme Park are examples of a slightly incongruous mixture of the Elizabethan and Palladian in a single facade.
Even though the style was being revived in his time, in 1905 the American architectural historian Charles Herbert Moore held that: "While one great house of the period differs from another in unimportant ways, those in which ornaments are extensively applied are without exception disfigured by them.
At Kenilworth Castle, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester did not want to lose the historic royal associations of his building, and from 1563 modernised and extended it to harmonize the old and new,[38] though the expanses of glass still impressed Midlanders.
Earlier, Compton Wynyates (begun c. 1481, greatly extended 1515–1525) was a resolutely unsymmetrical jumble of essentially medieval styles, including prominent half-timbering on the gables of the facade.
In contrast, prodigy houses, like castles before them, often deliberately chose exposed sites where they could command the landscape (Wollaton, Hardwick); their owners mostly did not anticipate being there in winter.
