A country house is a detached, generously sized dwelling on a large plot outside the built-up area, originally built as a rural retreat for wealthy townspeople. It differs from a farmhouse in having no agricultural function, and from a castle or fortified manor in having no defensive role and none of the seigneurial rights attached to landholding.
Architectural characteristics
- A symmetrical main composition with a clear central projecting bay, often crowned by a pediment.
- A raised principal floor (the piano nobile) set half a storey above a basement, reached by an external flight of steps.
- A long approach drive and a deliberately staged arrival: the house is placed to be seen.
- Designed grounds — formal and geometric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then laid out in the landscape style from the late eighteenth century onwards, with sweeping paths and sight lines.
- Ancillary buildings — coach house, orangery, gardener’s cottage, a tea pavilion at the water’s edge.
History
The heyday falls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Netherlands, merchants from the cities built country seats along the Vecht and the Amstel, in the Gooi and on the Utrecht Hill Ridge. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a broader country-house style developed, drawing on English cottage architecture, the Amsterdam School and traditionalism.
Alteration and regulation
Many country houses are listed, often together with the surrounding grounds. That has direct consequences:
- Alterations to a listed building require consent; the permitted development freedoms that apply to an ordinary house largely fall away.
- The garden layout, drive, boundary treatment and outbuildings may all form part of the designation.
- Insulation and services call for solutions that do not damage the elevations or the interior: secondary glazing rather than new windows, and internal insulation designed with the moisture behaviour of solid walls in mind.
Budget for maintenance on a different scale from an ordinary house: roof areas, gutters, timber windows and paintwork are simply many times greater in area.
Related terms
- Piano nobile
- Pediment
- Orangery
- Listed building
- Dutch classicism
- Planning permission
- Farmhouse
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