The transition from Kingston Hall to Kingston Lacy: The Bankes' fifty-year search for an adequate dining room

Extract

The Restoration house in England owed much to the refinements of Roger Pratt and Hugh May who drew their inspiration from architectural forms they had seen in Holland, France and Italy during their peripatetic years under the Commonwealth. In its basic double-pile rectangular form at Pratt's Coleshill of the 1650s, it consisted of placing the principal rooms on the central short axis of the house in a medieval ‘Hall-house’ relationship to one another; that is, a double-height hall with a great parlour next to it and the great chamber above that. At Coleshill Pratt placed the great stairs in the hall itself but in his later version at Kingston Hall of 1663 he increased the depth of the house to form a triple-pile plan and placed the great stairs and the great backstairs on either side of the hall on the long axis of the house (Plan 1).

At the four corners he placed eight identical apartments on two floors, each consisting of a room about 20 ft square with two 10 ft square closets at their outer end. Pratt advocates in his notes that this permits flexible use of rooms for different purposes, and room functions did indeed change.