Houses
At the Restoration of Charles II, May was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed Paymaster of the King's Works on 29 June 1660. His architectural commissions came from Court acquaintances, and his first completed work was Eltham Lodge, Kent (1663–1664), for Sir John Shaw, Bt. Built in brick, with a stone pediment and Ionic pilasters, the double-pile house reflected Dutch influence. Cornbury House, Oxfordshire (1663–1668), was built in a similar style, but with a Corinthian pediment, for Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. May's most prominent house was Berkeley House, on Piccadilly, London (1664–1666, demolished 1733), for Lord Berkeley. It was again in the same style, but with the addition of quadrant colonnades, a feature derived from Palladio, and which was again much imitated. At Cassiobury, Hertfordshire (1674, demolished 1922), May added wings to the home of the Earl of Essex, and redesigned some of the interiors, giving the woodcarver Grinling Gibbons his first major commission. It is possible that May was the architect of the first Burlington House, for Sir John Denham, and he certainly advised the Earl of Burlington after he purchased the house in 1667. He was also involved in construction or alterations at Chilton Lodge, Berkshire (1666, rebuilt), Holme Lacy, Herefordshire (1673–1674), and Moor Park, Hertfordshire (1679–1684, rebuilt).
May's houses drew on contemporary Dutch classicism, as exemplified by the Mauritshuis (1636–1641), and introduced an economical, yet classically refined, style of house into England. Simpler than the work of Jones, or Pratt, the style was widely imitated, for example at Melton Constable, Norfolk (1665), or Ramsbury Manor, Wiltshire (1681–1686). May's and Pratt's developments of Inigo Jones' works influenced their contemporary Sir Christopher Wren, and spread to Scotland in the work of Sir William Bruce.
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Famous quotes containing the word houses:
“The spectacle of misery grew in its crushing volume. There seemed to be no end to the houses full of hunted starved children. Children with dysentery, children with scurvy, children at every stage of starvation.... We learned to know that the barometer of starvation was the number of children deserted in any community.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)