Sir John Soane in the doghouse

lucinda lambton

In 1806, Sir John Soane completed his grand sweep of alterations and additions to Port Eliot – originally the 13th-century Priory of St Germans.

He had been commissioned by the second Lord Eliot, a man of action and taste who had already done much of Port Eliot’s landscaping himself.

Soane’s work was to embrace the whole estate, making considerable alterations and additions to the house, as well as designing heavily machicolated Gothic stables, along with a dairy and an ingenious, tricking-the-eye house for the cattle.

Beneath the eaves, what appears to be a fluted frieze is in fact a ventilating system of considerable length, operated by a knob which, when pulled, slides panels aside to open or close the flutes.

What a delicate doubling-up of taste and technology, to be sure!

The greatest elegance was applied with considerable charm on buildings for animals throughout the country. Elihu Burritt, the American consul in Birmingham, described the practice charmingly in 1863, in A Walk from London to John O’Groats

Burritt was the self-educated son of a Connecticut cobbler, philanthropist, emancipationist and writer. Previously a blacksmith’s apprentice, he was known as ‘the learned blacksmith’.

In his book, he described his first taste of clotted cream from the cows of Port Eliot as ‘that most delectable of luxuries. I remember meeting with an old musty volume many years ago containing a learned disquisition in Latin on the question of whether the butter of Abraham placed before the angels was really butter or this very cream.’

Cows were one of Soane’s favourites. The ‘Elevation of a Dairy House in the Moresque Stile’ appeared in his Designs in Architecture of 1778.

It was produced when he was only 25 (he had yet to add the ‘e’ of supposed distinction to his name).

This book was his first publication, allowing him to commit fantastical and high-flying ideas. Hurrah for such gall. Only two years earlier, when he was a student at the Royal Academy, his quite stupendous design for a Triumphal Bridge won the Royal Academy’s Gold Medal.

It so impressed George III that the young student was sent on a three-yearlong Grand Tour, paid for by the Royal Academy’s travelling scholarship. In Rome, he met Piranesi and the mould was cast for Soane to become the greatest Romantic classicist of all time.

He was a colossus in all matters architectural, not least for our purposes with his designs for animal buildings. At Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire, he drew up plans for the estate managed by the Earl of Hardwick to have an 11-bay façade for chickens’ nesting boxes.

In 1794, a thatched farm was blessed with ‘capital piggeries’ and deer pens, all designed by the great man himself – and a very great man he was too.

Many more such delights were created for creatures. The ‘residence for a canine family of ancient times’ is worth a serious mention: it was designed in 1798 for the disreputable Lord Bishop of Derry, Frederick Augustus Hervey, soon to be elevated to become the 4th Earl of Bristol.

They met in Italy, where the Lord Bishop bewitched the young architect with grand proposals for his Irish estate.

First came the classical dog kennel for the hounds of his eldest son, inspired by a visit Hervey and Soane made to Lucullus’s villa near Terracina on Christmas Day in 1778.

Without unsightly concessions to the kennel’s working role, a circular exercise yard embraces three wings which splay forth from the central rotunda. One is a residence for the kennel man, another for the veterinary sick bay and the third for the bitches – while dogs are kept beneath the dome.

With the Doric order – so simple, clean and clear – the Bishop and Soane made a handsome case for the general use of the neoclassical style. As a proud cheer – or bark – four dogs sit tall on the parapet, while another leaps high in the sky on the weathervane.

Although the original architectural drawings were lost – no doubt purloined by the Lord Bishop – Soane made a copy of them from memory in 1781, to be exhibited in the Royal Academy. This is what hangs in Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn today.

Below: Soane’s doghouse, an 1835 copy of his original 1779 design

Nothing was to come of any of it: cock-a-hoop with such important commissions, Soane cut short his precious studies in Italy and sped to work on the Bishop’s estates at Ickworh, Suffolk, and Downhill, Ireland.

It was to be in vain. His proposals were rejected and he returned to England without payment – not even for every penny spent on travel!

He never got over it. In his memoirs, 50 years laterk he wrote, ‘Experience … taught me how much I had overrated the magnificent promises and splendid delusions of the Lord Bishop of Derry.’

Despite rejecting the great Soane, the Bishop was a builder on the grand scale – creating not only palaces and houses, but also an abundance of roads, bridges and monuments. His roadworks alone were likened to those of a Roman emperor rather than an Irish bishop.

Hervey enjoyed himself, too. William Childe Pemberton’s biography says that, when Hervey was in Italy, it wasn’t only his building style that likened him to a Roman emperor.