Holland Park Living
Façade
The house front was the simplest natural expression of this practical scheme. Generally the brickwork was of London yellow stocks laid in Flemish bond. Stucco was for the most part only sparingly used until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, although the lower part of the house façade up to the string marking the first-floor level might be stuccoed, sometimes with channelling to simulate stone-coursing-a practice still prevalent in the 1830’s. Where face brickwork was employed it was customary to apply a stucco rendering to the reveal of the window openings, whilst the heads of all rectangular openings were spanned by flat arches of finely gauged brick applied as a facing with a timber bressumer or lintel behind.
In Regency times the architectural style of London houses favoured refinement so mouldings were as slender as possible. In later Victorian times mouldings became much more exuberant.
The cornices and other horizontal members were commonly reduced to mere stone or stucco strings but the façades almost always adhered to a Palladian scheme of proportions in which the ground storey represented the base upon which a giant order of architecture might be raised to embrace the first and second storeys so as to support an entablature above the heads of the second-floor windows. This order was seldom present, but even in the most simple sorts of houses it is implied, its ghost regulating the shape and proportion of the house front.
The back of the house was usually totally practical and undecorated. There were often small windows on the half-landings. In later Victorian houses built with large gardens, it became the norm to give the back of a house a facade almost as elaborate as on the street side.
