Description

Robert Smirke, circa 1815. Single storey, 3-bay, rectangular-plan Greek Revival, astylar gatelodge with projecting semi-octagonal entrance bay and later rendered piend-roofed extension to rear. Polished sandstone ashlar. Base course; deep banded entablature; wreath paterae above shallow corner pilasters. Corniced windows with projecting cills. Timber-panelled front door in carved architrave.

8-pane glazing in timber sash and case windows ( 4 pane glazing flanking doorway). Roof flat or very shallowly pitched. Ashlar stack at rear with yellow and red cans. Cast-iron rain water goods.

GATES AND GATEPIERS: three ashlar gatepiers forming with N wall of lodge two pedestrian gateways and central carriageway (that on N of carriageway a replacement in artificial stone) with iron gates with acorn finials; rendered curved screen walls to NW and SE of gates.

Statement of Interest

This is a simple and elegant building and is important as a little altered example of the work of Sir Robert Smirke.

Sir Robert Smirke (1760-1867) was one the most prominent architects in Britain in the first half of the 19th century and a leading exponent of the Greek Revival style. After training with Sir John Soane and George Dance, he enjoyed immediate success as a practising architect and became known to a wide range of influential patrons through which he received a range of country house commissions. In 1813 he was nominated as one of the three architects attached to the Office of Works and this brought him several major commissions including that for the design of the British Museum in the early 1820s, possibly his finest Greek Revival work. There are more than a dozen buildings designed by Smirke in Scotland and are all of high quality.

Plans dating from about 1815 for the East Lodge at Newton Don are held in V&A Architecture Study Rooms. Smirke's original design was for a pair of single bay lodges linked by flat arch carried on four Doric columns with carriageway running below. This was reduced to the present single lodge, situated on S side of the driveway.

External Links

• Historic Environment Scotland Listing
• Wikidata Q17844509

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Old House Handbook: A Practical Guide to Care and Repair
• 
  Maintaining and Repairing Old Houses: A Guide to Conservation, Sustainability and Economy
• 
  Oxfordshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  The Listed Buildings and Other Principal Structures at the Royal Gunpowder Mills Waltham Abbey
• 
  Hampshire: South (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Devon (Pevsner Buildings of England)