The Ashdown and Audsley brothers were famous for writing books about ornamentation. One of their most famous works was Polychromatic Decoration as Applied to Buildings in the Medieval Style, which came out in 1882 and had 36 chromolithographed plates. Another book they wrote was Cottage Lodge and Villa Architecture, which came out in 1868. Blackburne wrote in a lot of different styles, but this book focused on Gothic and similar styles.
This book used quotes from Pugin, Ruskin, and G.G. Scott to explain the choice between national styles, which were brought back to life by Pugin, and “domestic Italian.” It made the case that “it is to be desired that one style of architecture should be adopted by us in the present day; but we cannot hope to see that desirable end attained so long as individual taste and fancy are allowed to rule in matters of architecture.”
The book made the case for Gothic as the best and easiest style to work with. It also liked Elizabethan styles, like half-timbered or palatial ones, even though they weren’t as pretty. Even though the Italian style used in homes was “too well known…to require any description,” it was agreed that it had its benefits “as a style for villa buildings.”
Around the same time, Blackie’s published a big, expensive book called Villa and Cottage Architecture: Select Examples of Country and Suburban Residences Recently Erected. Robert Kerr had a copy of this book. The book was meant to meet a need for more books with plans for different types of middle-class homes, rather than country homes or small, cheap homes, which were already well covered.
Blackie’s book has a picture of Henry Kendall’s Cottage orné in the style of the time “from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century,” which was built in Mill Green, Essex, in 1845. In Turnham Green, Kensington, Childerditch, Aldershot, Twickenham, and Cambridge, this design and a different form of it were also used. Henry Kendall had written a pattern book called Modern Architecture, which came out in three sets from 1846 to 1856.
Each of the large format books in the first run, which cost £111s 6d, had 12 hand-colored lithographed views of houses in the London area. About half of them were designs by Kendall. Some of these were Italianate homes in Camden, Hampstead, Notting Hill, and Regent’s Park, as well as houses in Kensington Palace Gardens, one of which was designed by Owen Jones.
This book went into a lot more detail than the others that were mentioned. It showed each design in full and the “considerable diversity in internal arrangements, in the structural treatment of materials, and in decorative character, style, and ornamental detail.” Other pattern books were mostly seen as collections of untested designs with a single plan and pictorial view, or as representations of historical structures and details.
Instead of being a copy book, this book was meant to be an inspiration and a help to keep costs from going over budget.27 All 31 houses were built in the last 20 years by 19 different architects, such as Banks and Barry, Henry Darbishire, David Cousins, Ewan Christian, Speakman and Charlesworth, Edward Walters, and E.B. Lamb. They were described as “of moderate dimensions, or erected at a cost… ranging from £500 to £2500, but including some examples of more expensive character.” Some of them were from Scotland, London, the Midlands, and the North.
The Elizabethan and Jacobean styles were still popular in 1870, as shown by two books that came out that year. One of these was Thomas Morris’s A House for the Suburbs. It wasn’t a pattern book; instead, it was a social and architectural sketch of the suburban house, with a picture of the perfect house on the front cover. It was “a popular subject, treated in a popular style,” and it talked about everything from suburban life to the price of land. It also gave average prices for different types of architecture. For example, an Italian parsonage with no decorations would cost £1400–1600 to build with rich Gothic details and £1700 to build with Tudor/Elizabethan details. Beaumanor Hall in Leicestershire, which was built by his old teacher, William Railton, cost £10,000.