The Tower House - Design

Design

From 1875, although he continued to work on the completion of projects already begun, Burges received no further major commissions. The construction, decoration and furnishing of Tower House occupied much of the last six years of his life. Burges designed the house in the style of a substantial thirteenth century French townhouse. Of red brick, and in an L plan, the exterior is plain. The house is not large, its floor-plan being little more than 50 feet square. But the approach Burges took to its construction was on a grand scale: the floor depths were sufficient to support rooms four or five times their size and the architect Richard Norman Shaw wrote of the concrete foundations as being suitable "for a fortress." This approach, combined with Burges's architectural skills and the minimum of exterior decoration, created a building that Crook describes as "simple and massive". As was usual with Burges, many elements of earlier designs were adapted and included, the street frontage from the other town house Burges designed, McConnochie House, the cylindrical tower and conical roof from Castell Coch and the interiors from Cardiff Castle. The exterior is made from red brick, with Bath stone dressings and green slates from Cumberland. Burges' neighbour Luke Fildes would describe Tower House as a "model modern house of moderately large size in the 13th-century style built to show what may be done for 19th-century everyday wants"

The interior centres on the double-height entrance hall, Burges having avoided the error that he had made at the McConnochie House when he placed a vast central staircase in the middle of the building. At The Tower House, the stair is consigned to the conical tower. The ground floor contains a drawing room, dining room and library, while the first floor holds bedroom suites and a study. If Burges shunned exterior decoration at The Tower House, he more than compensated internally. Each room has a complex iconographic scheme of decoration: that of the hall is Time, in the drawing room, Love, in Burges's bedroom, the Sea. Massive fireplaces with elaborate overmantels were carved and installed, a castle in the library and mermaids and sea-monsters of the deep in his own bedroom.

Burges deployed the talents of artists Henry Stacy Marks and Fred Weeks in the paintings of murals at Tower House. Marks painted birds above the 'Alphabet' frieze in the library, and Weeks painted legendary lovers in the drawing-room.

"The most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival, and the last."

In designing the medieval interior to the house, Burges also illustrated his skill as a jeweller, metalworker and designer, and produced some of his best works of furniture including the Zodiac Settle, the Dog Cabinet and the Great Bookcase, the last of which Charles Handley-Read described as "occupying a unique position in the history of Victorian painted furniture." The fittings were as elaborate as the furniture: the tap for one of the guest washstands was in the form of a bronze bull from whose throat water poured into a sink inlaid with silver fish. Within the Tower House Burges placed some of his finest metalwork; the artist Henry Stacy Marks wrote "he could design a chalice as well as a cathedral...His decanters, cups, jugs, forks and spoons were designed with an equal ability to that with which he would design a castle."

Upon completion, the Tower House was sensationally received. In a survey of the architecture of the past fifty years, published by The Builder in 1893, it was the only private town house to be included. Crook considers the house, the "synthesis of career and a glittering tribute to his achievement." The Tower House retains much of its internal structural decoration, but the furniture and contents that Burges designed for his home have been dispersed.

Both the exterior and the interior echo again and again the highlights of Burges' earlier career, revised and re-worked as appropriate. A frontage from the McConnochie House, a cylindrical tower and conical roof from Castell Coch, fireplaces from Cardiff Castle, Burges designed with "the experience of twenty years learning, travelling and building. The house was to be the "synthesis of his career and a glittering tribute to his achievement". The fireplaces Burges constructed, which, unlike many of the fittings, remain, were a particular tour-de-force, "veritable altars of art..some of the most amazing pieces of decoration Burges ever designed". The Tower House stands as "the most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival and the last, (representing) the ne plus ultra of domestic Gothic", described by William Lethaby as "massive, learned, glittering, amazing". Burges died in his 'Mermaid bedroom' at the Tower House in 1881.

Garden

The garden at the back of Tower House features raised flowerbeds "planned according to those pleasances depicted in mediaeval romances; beds of scarlet tulips, bordered with stone fencing". The gardens of Tower House and the adjacent house, Woodland House, both contain trees from the former Little Holland House.