THE TOWN HOUSE IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE

is the square—introduced, as has been said, by Inigo Jones—ie. an
isolated, privately owned area with houses of, asa rule, similar but not
identical design, examples of good manners and not of regimen-
tation. It might be worth adding that the sensation in walking
through the West End of London from square to square is clearly a
modern and secular version of the typically English sensation of the
visitor passing from isolated compartment to isolated compartment
in a Saxon or Early English church.

Regarding the individual town house, there is the same contrast
between London and Paris.
In London, but for a few
exceptions, the nobleman
and the wealthy merchant
. lived in terrace houses, in
Paris in detached htiteb. In
London a ground plan had
been evolved for these houses
that was convenient enough
to become standardised
before the end of the
I yth century. With its en-
trance on one side, leading

straight to the staircase, one large front room and one large back
room on each floor, and the service rooms in the basement, it
remained practically unaltered for the largest and the smallest
house until the end of the Victorian era. Of spatially effective
elements it has little. In Paris, on the other hand, architects from
about 1630 onwards developed house plans with great consistency
and ingenuity towards ever subtler solutions of functional require-
ments and spatial desires. The standard elements were a cour d'hon-
neur, screened off from the street, with offices and stables in wings
on the right and the left, and the corps de logis at the back. The
earliest plan of wholly symmetric^ organisation is the H6tel de
Bretomnllers of about 1625-30. The first high-water marks are
Mansart's H6tel de la Vrilliere of about 1635 and Levau's H6tel
'Lambert of shortly after 1642, the latter with a courtyard with two
rounded corners and an oval vestibule (fig. 90). A little later
Lepautre's Hotel de Beauvais (1655-60) revels in curves. Then the
same reaction took place which we had seen between Vaux and die
Louvre. Colbert did not like curves, he called them in 1669 "not

90.

LOUIS LEVAU; HOTEL LAMBERT, PARIS,
ABOUT 1645.

E.A.—13

175