These photos reflect an interest in - at times perhaps an obsession with? - domestic architecture from around 1600 to 1800. This has developed from living in an old house and thinking about how its plan reflected the way it was used, and why its component parts look the way they do. That's the reason many of these photos focus on the details of a building, things like the balusters in a staircase or the design of an eaves cornice.

I've added some descriptive comments, often shamelessly borrowed from Listing documents (thanks to English Heritage), but also modified and sometimes revised. I want these notes to be as neutral as possible and to clarify exactly what is seen in the building. For me this is a way to pinpoint the visual evidence contained in the photograph, and while I hope the images are of interest to people in their own right, you'll see from the way that the sets are arranged that I view them primarily in terms of architectural information.

Personally, however, I'm not just concerned with itemizing the physical evidence of a building. I'm more concerned with the reasons why a building took the shape it did. The lack of uniformity is very different from modern house building. For example, staircases in the eighteenth century may differ a lot between houses in their width or the height of their treads, proportions that may reflect the height (or girth) of the carpenter who made them who had no conception of building standards. As a result, I hope some of these photos show the surprising variation in buildings from within the same time period, as well as the vitality of their design.