The classical castle

THE ‘castle style’ of the Georgian era might be said to have been invented by Vanbrugh, who aimed to give ‘something of the castle air’ with his additions to Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, in 1707–10 . In practice, that amounted to little more than a battlemented parapet applied to a completely symmetrical building. In the late 18th century, the architect Robert Adam was undoubtedly influenced by Vanbrugh, whose mastery of what he called ‘movement’ in architectural composition—‘the rise and fall, the advance and recess with other diversity of form, in the different parts of a building’— he admired (although he deplored the Baroque master’s ‘barbarisms and absurdities’).

It is possibly in deference to Vanbrugh, therefore, that, at a time when Adam’s rivals began to feel that Picturesque asymmetry and Gothic detailing were highly desirable in the design of houses in a castle style, Adam stuck strictly to overall symmetry. As an added curiosity, he showed little interest in Gothic trimmings. Indeed, he lacked any scholarly interest in medieval architecture and his relatively few essays may be charming, but are quite inauthentic. A much more powerful influence on his ‘castle’ exteriors—with the striking exception of