Italianate style in England

John Nash is considered as the first exponent of the Italianate style of architecture in England. Around 1802, his design of a small country house called Cronkhill in Shropshire, drew inspiration from the Italianate style villa. This model is generally accepted to be the forerunner of the Italianate architecture of the late Regency and early Victorian times.

In 1805, commissioned by the dowager Lady Ashburton to design the Sandridge Park at Stoke Gabriel in Devon, Nash came up with a country mansion that distinctly marks the development from the picturesque of William Gilpin and his own advancing Italianism. Although this small house can be categorized as belonging to the Regency era, its informal asymmetrical plan along with its loggias and balconies of both stone and wrought iron, tower and low pitched roof bear a very strong resemblance to the entirely Italianate design of Cronkhill.

Subsequent illustrations of the Italianate style in England are more in the form of Palladian style architecture usually emphasized by a belvedere tower with renaissance type balustrades at the roof level. Such a variant is a more stylistic representation of what architects and patrons believed to be in vogue in Italy. This style demonstrates the influence of Italian Renaissance motifs more explicitly than the earlier representations of the Italianate style by Nash.

During the 1830s, Sir Charles Barry, the architect famous for his illustrations of the Tudor and Gothic styles at the Houses of Parliament in London, developed and furthered the Italianate style. Unlike Nash, Barry drew his inspiration directly from Italy, and also unlike Nash’s semi-rustic Italianate style, Barry’s style was more urban. Barry’s designs very frequently used the motifs of the original Italian Renaissance villas of Rome (the Lazio and the Veneto); this concept led to what came to be accepted as the Italianate style. His best example in this style was the large Neo-Renaissance mansion Cliveden.

The simple classical lines of Barry’s Italianate style appealed to Thomas Cubitt, a London building contactor, who borrowed this architectural element into several of his London terraces. Cubitt designed Osbourne House under the commission of Prince Albert, and oversaw its completion in 1851. Cubitt’s synthesis of his two-dimensional street architecture into this freestanding mansion popularized the Italianate design to its heights. The design style became widely accepted for the small mansions constructed by the new and wealthy industrialists of the period. These were mainly built in cities surrounded by large gardens, and usually had layouts of a terrace Tuscan style. Under similar backgrounds, mansard roofs would also be used on Italianate villas and then termed Chateauesque. Many Italianate villas are found in Belgravia, London. The Osborne House also inspired numerous Italianate villas all over the British Empire.

Although classical styles, mainly Italianate, supposedly were used for round about one third of early Victorian country houses in England, the style began to decline in popularity and by 1855; the Gothic, Tudor, or Elizabethan styles emerged as the most favored style of an English country house.

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