Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

Here’s another view of that triple gabled house at Barnham Court, west Sussex, with its clever rain water disposal system tucked away around the corner from the front facade.

That prominant projecting, indented, cornice, here executed in brickwork, reappears in timber as the classic eaves detail to a dormered roof in the next phase of English domestic architecture, a tradition that we shared for a good twenty years before we unexpectedly took up the curvilinear gable and ran with it for the bulk of the next fifty years. Both traditions were ultimately killed off by the questionable charms of the flat parapet.

Above is a view [circa 1760], by Thomas Sandby, of Beaufort Buildings, a residential development built on the site of Buaufort House just south of the Strand in London in the 1680s. Several of the houses may have been remodelled in the interim and some dormers certainly look enlarged, but the general streetscape with its repeating pattern of projecting eaves and ranks of dormers is probably substantially original and gives a good idea what a post-gabled [London] and a pre-gabled [Dublin] streetscape looked like.