In English architecture, mainly from the Tudor period onwards, a banqueting house is a separate pavilion-like building reached through the gardens from the main residence, whose use is purely for entertaining, especially eating. Or it may be built on the roof of a main house, as in many 16th-century prodigy houses. It may be raised for additional air or a vista, with a simple kitchen below, as at Hampton Court Palace and Wrest Park, and it may be richly decorated, but it normally contains no bedrooms, and typically a single grand room apart from any service spaces. [1] The design is often ornamental, if not downright fanciful, and some are also follies, as in Paxton's Tower. There are usually plenty of windows, as appreciating the view was a large part of their purpose. Often they are built on a slope, so that from the front, only the door to the main room can be seen; the door to the servants' spaces underneath was hidden at the back (Wrest Park). The Banqueting House, Gibside is an example.
In the English of the period, "banquet" had two distinct meanings: firstly a grand formal celebratory meal (the usual modern sense), but also a course or light meal taken in a special place away from the main dining place, the relevant sense here (Whitehall apart). [2] In large meals a banqueting house was most likely to be used for eating dessert, if reasonably close to the main house. Otherwise it might be used on fine days for taking tea, or any kind of drink, snack or meal. [3]
The best known example, though far larger than most, is the Banqueting House on Whitehall, once part of Whitehall Palace. This is a grand dining hall for full formal meals, and what may be called in distinction a banqueting hall. Such buildings were created in various settings, for example at Cholmley House next to Whitby Abbey, which had been converted into a country house. [4] Most banqueting houses fitted at most twenty people, and many fewer.
Similar buildings, under various names such as "pavilion", appear in the architecture of European and many Asian countries. Its contemporary Italian equivalent was a casina ; the Casina Pio IV in the grounds of the Vatican Palace, (1550s-1560s) is an architecturally important example. Large French examples, like the Château du Grand Jardin of the House of Guise are called a maison de plaisance (house of pleasures).
Hampton Court Palace is a Grade I listed royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, 12 miles southwest and upstream of central London on the River Thames.
William Kent was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
Sir William Chambers was a Swedish-born British architect. Among his best-known works are Somerset House, and the pagoda at Kew. Chambers was a founder member of the Royal Academy.
Inigo Jones was the first significant architect in England in the early modern period, and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings. As the most notable architect in England, Jones was the first person to introduce the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance to Britain. He left his mark on London by his design of single buildings, such as the Queen's House which is the first building in England designed in a pure classical style, and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, as well as the layout for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End. He made major contributions to stage design by his work as a theatrical designer for several dozen masques, most by royal command and many in collaboration with Ben Jonson.
The Palace of Whitehall – also spelled White Hall – at Westminster was the main residence of the English monarchs from 1530 until 1698, when most of its structures, with the notable exception of Inigo Jones's Banqueting House of 1622, were destroyed by fire. Henry VIII moved the royal residence to White Hall after the old royal apartments at the nearby Palace of Westminster were themselves destroyed by fire. Although the Whitehall palace has not survived, the area where it was located is still called Whitehall and has remained a centre of the British government.
Montacute House is a late Elizabethan mansion with a garden in Montacute, South Somerset, England.
Piano nobile is the architectural term for the principal floor of a palazzo. This floor contains the main reception and bedrooms of the house.
The Nymphenburg Palace is a Baroque palace situated in Munich's western district Neuhausen-Nymphenburg, in Bavaria, southern Germany. The Nymphenburg served as the main summer residence for the former rulers of Bavaria of the House of Wittelsbach. Combined with the adjacent Nymphenburg Palace Park it constitutes one of the premier royal palaces of Europe. Its frontal width of 632 m (2,073 ft) even surpasses Versailles.
An English country house is a large house or mansion in the English countryside. Such houses were often owned by individuals who also owned a town house. This allowed them to spend time in the country and in the city—hence, for these people, the term distinguished between town and country. However, the term also encompasses houses that were, and often still are, the full-time residence for the landed gentry who dominated rural Britain until the Reform Act 1832. Frequently, the formal business of the counties was transacted in these country houses, having functional antecedents in manor houses.
In architecture, pavilion has several meanings:
Henry Holland was an architect to the English nobility.
James Paine (1717–1789) was an English architect. He worked on number of country houses such as Chatsworth House, Thorndon Hall and Kedleston Hall.
The Residenz in central Munich is the former royal palace of the Wittelsbach monarchs of Bavaria. The Residenz is the largest city palace in Germany and is today open to visitors for its architecture, room decorations, and displays from the former royal collections.
The Schleißheim Palace comprises three individual palaces in a grand Baroque park in the village of Oberschleißheim, a suburb of Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The palace was a summer residence of the Bavarian rulers of the House of Wittelsbach.
Servants' quarters are those parts of a building, traditionally in a private house, which contain the domestic offices and staff accommodation. From the late 17th century until the early 20th century, they were a common feature in many large houses. Sometimes they are an integral part of a smaller house—in the basements and attics, especially in a town house, while in larger houses they are often a purpose-built adjacent wing or block. In architectural descriptions and guidebooks of stately homes, the servants' quarters are frequently overlooked, yet they form an important piece of social history, often as interesting as the principal part of the house itself.
The Banqueting House, on Whitehall in the City of Westminster, central London, is the grandest and best-known survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting houses, constructed for elaborate entertaining. It is the only large surviving component of the Palace of Whitehall, the residence of English monarchs from 1530 to 1698. The building is important in the history of English architecture as the first structure to be completed in the classical style of Palladian architecture which was to transform English architecture.
Swarkestone Hall Pavilion, also known as Swarkestone Stand and The Grandstand, is a 17th-century pavilion 200 metres north of the ruins of Swarkestone Hall, Swarkestone, Derbyshire. It is a Grade I listed building south of Chellaston on the A514.
Prodigy houses are large and showy English country houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either "noble palaces of an awesome scale" or "proud, ambitious heaps" according to taste. The prodigy houses stretch over the periods of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture, though the term may be restricted to a core period of roughly 1570 to 1620. Many of the grandest were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm. Many are therefore close to major roads, often in the English Midlands.
Goose-Pie House was a small English Baroque house built by John Vanbrugh in Whitehall, London, in 1701. The house was demolished in 1898. The site now lies under the southeast corner of the Old War Office Building on Whitehall, near the Gurkha Memorial statue on Horse Guards Avenue.
In the history of gardening and landscaping, a canal is a relatively large piece of water that has a very regular shape, usually long, thin and rectangular. The peak period for garden canals was the 17th and 18th centuries, by the end of which less formal water features were in favour, in the style of the English landscape garden. It is distinguished from a garden pond or lake by its shape, and typically falls somewhere between the two in area. It might be wholly artificial, created by diverting and damming a stream, or based around a natural water feature which is landscaped. Usually it appears to be enclosed, though in fact water passes in and out by channels below the surface. The edges are often walled, and the water relatively shallow.