Design No. 10 — An Entrance Lodge to a Park
This lodge stands within an ancient park in Kent. It occupies a triangular piece of ground and commands three roads of approach. The building is strictly in accordance with the style of the old family mansion within the park itself, which is a celebrated structure of the times of Elizabeth and James I. The perspective view represents the lodge as seen from the avenue of trees within the park, the road coming between. In the ground plan, p. 105, a is the porch, b the living room, c the scullery, and d the larder; g are the steps leading to a vault under the stairs, used for coals, and f is the stone cover over the dry well. Considerable care and attention were bestowed in working out the details of this building, which was wholly erected by the workmen of the estate, with bricks and stone also from the estate. The lower part or plinth of the structure is of ashlar ragstone in random courses, the top course header faced, the joints worked fair, and a sunk splay in the top tooled fair, the course rising nine inches on the face, with an average depth in the bed of eleven inches. The string over the lower windows is in moulded brick, faced with compo,—the gables and the chimneys are constructed and finished with cut red bricks. The finials, of which there are three, are copied from those of the old mansion, and cost each 3l. The front and side elevations are here given, together with the details of the entrance porch. The columns were formed of trunks of trees, with an entablature and pediment of brick tiles and compo, with iron ties securing the whole.
The brick walls were splashed externally in four colours, black, white, red, and yellow, which gave a very pleasing tone of colour to the whole. The plan of the upper floor shows the rooms like the lower, each of the average length of 21 and a width of 10 feet. The staircase leads conveniently to the two upper rooms; a is a trap-door to permit furniture and large baggage to be lifted up from below. The sections show the construction of the roof, the timbers of which were firmly secured by iron straps, b b. The chimney forms a prominent feature in the centre of the building, the construction of which is shown in the annexed cut; c are corbel bricks, b the iron strap.
The last two illustrations are sections through the coal-cellar and the dry well. The photographic view shows the small circular gable over the staircase. There are only six of these gables, as a seventh could not be obtained, or it might have been called the “house with the seven gables.” The structure cost 526l., the cottage design No. 2, on the same estate, 311l., both in full.