Orangery Origins

The Orangery at Longleat

      
The other day I went for an initial site visit to a new assignment; to uncover the history of a fine country house in the West Country.  It was at least eighteenth century but with a substantial Victorian addition on the front. 

The owners had recently had what I will call in general terms a glazed room attached to the rear elevation. It was a stylish construction; a combination of timber, brick and glass in a square formation and a hipped partially-glazed roof.  Given the low-ceilings and dark rooms of the rear of the eighteenth century part of the building it was much a much-needed and appropriate addition to the whole house. However, I was struck by the fact that it was referred to it as an “Orangery”. The designation of rooms and their names can change over time and this has certainly happened with this part of a house. 

These days a glazed construction on a house could be an Orangery, a Conservatory, a Garden Room or a Sun Room. Having said that, I suppose an Orangery can be one purely through its use. If you grow oranges and other similar citrus fruit, then wherever they are growing is an orangery and the style of housing is irrelevant. However, speaking architecturally and historically, we can be a little more specific.

Orangery origins can be found in France and Italy and they have been in England since the sixteenth century. However, it was the social and cultural influence of the Dutch during the reign of William III that brought this piece of garden history to wider popularity, albeit among the high strata of society. 

Royalty and the nobility at this time would have an Orangery constructed in the grounds of their country houses to grow precious tropical fruit coming from lands around the globe. These new fruits needed warmth to thrive and the buildings were constructed to provide the required environment. The most popular fruit was the orange and so, simply, this fruit gave the name. Fine examples of Orangeries are at Kenwood House in North London, Sir William's Chamber's Orangery at The Botanical Gardens at Kew and Vanbrugh's 1704 design at Kensington Palace. All these are open to the public.

The Crystal Palace

Early glass making technology meant producing large quantities of glass was difficult and expensive and not easy to use in construction to any great extent. Orangeries therefore tended to have stone-built parapet walls but with large vertical sliding sash windows to control temperature. They would also have a glass roof on timber rafters. In addition, orangeries were usually separate from the main house. So in reality a genuine orangery tends to be pre-nineteenth century, of this particular style and very much detached.

In the mid-nineteenth century, glass houses that were attached to the side of a house, and where plants of all kinds were cultivated, became popular, beyond the social boundaries of the aristocracy and landed classes. This popularity occurred thanks to the abolition of glass tax in 1845 and also improvements in technology that led to the production of sheet glass and larger-scale cast iron manufacture. Paxton's Crystal Palace, constructed for the 1851 Great Exhibition was a major influence on its popularity.

So what makes an Orangery today? It is probably the proportion of glass to other building materials and the partially glazed hipped roof and its more square form or maybe it is just a matter of taste...

A Modern Orangery ©Vale Garden Houses Ltd

Kew Palace

This weekend, I had the fantastic opportunity to go on a photographic course at Kew Palace, in Richmond. It was run by Historic Royal Palaces and led by photographer Emily Harris. I love taking pictures of architecture, as I hope my Facebook and Flickr pages show, but I was useless at photographing indoors and this course was specifically for learning how to capture historic interiors with a digital SLR camera. We were a select group of 7 and had the small but perfectly formed “Palace” to ourselves as the place is officially closed to the public in the autumn and winter months.

Kew Palace is one of HRP’s more recent restorations. I had the privilege of visiting it half way through the restoration/conservation back in 2006, so it was a pleasure to see the place in a more finished state. Not that it is has been completely returned to resemble a royal residence. While some rooms have been painstakingly decorated and furnished to show how the house may have looked in about 1808, there are whole rooms untouched, with bare floorboards and unfinished walls. These allow you to see how the walls were constructed, layer by layer and give a fleeting look at the earlier, 17^th century fabric of the building behind.

Kew Palace has its origins in the 16^th century, with a Tudor undercroft as testament. It used to be called The Dutch House as it is constructed in the unmistakeable Dutch style and inside is laid out over 3 floors with the undercroft below and servants living quarters in the attic.

The exterior structure we see today was built in the 17^th century, the home of a wealthy merchant and was then converted to be a home for King George III his wife Queen Charlotte and 10 of their 15 children. Spending my day there, I learned that the house was mainly for the children and the Queen. George lived in an extension to the house, long since demolished. This was because George III was the unfortunate monarch who suffered from the disease “Porphyria” which manifested itself mainly in apparent raving madness.

But in his moments of sanity George and his wife were a devoted loving couple, who enjoyed the relative simplicity and small scale living at Kew with their children. Not that it was much fun for 3 of their daughters who lived there; liking its remoteness and their lack of a social life to being in a nunnery!

When one’s abiding passions are historic buildings and photography there isn't much about an historic interiors photography day at Kew that I could fault. In fact there wasn't. As a result, I like to think I can now take a mean interior shot and that this’ll translate in the research I prepare for my clients. But above all, my abiding memory will be having such privileged access for a whole day in one of Historic Royal Palace’s most beautiful and remarkable buildings.

Some of the photographs I took from the day will be posted on the Historic Buildings Research Facebook page and on my Flickr page too.