An Eighteenth-century House in Lancashire

 From House and Garden:

There is something unusually satisfying about a simple, classically composed façade between two pedimented wings: it is the essence of that vision of the Palladian form that runs as a golden thread through English architecture from the early eighteenth century. Beckside House, on the edge of the village of Barbon, on the remote north Lancashire border, is the home of distinguished herald, historian and author Dr John Martin Robinson, whose latest book Wilton House is published this week.

The house was built in 1767 – the date is inscribed on a lintel – and is perched above a stream but neatly tucked into rising land that gives it shelter. It was extended by the addition of low wings in the late twentieth century, in a manner that perhaps enhances the historic core and includes a full-depth room with windows to the east and south, which can only be described as the Englishman’s dream library.

Built of rubble stone, the front of the house is rendered and painted, with projecting stone quoins, all under a Westmorland slate roof. It has a happily formal, almost sculpted, character that represents the meeting of new metropolitan fashions with long-standing vernacular building practices. Part of the particular charm is the slightly old fashioned quality of the elegant classical detail, especially the interior joinery, with a combination of earlier Palladian and rococo elements. The finely carved pedimented front door was modelled on a type popularised by James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture (1728). (Read more.)