- Hi, I'm Michael Wyetzner,
and I've been an architect for 35 years.
Today. I'm breaking down hidden architectural details
in some of the mansions on "Bridgerton."
[aristocratic music]
First, let's take a look at the Bridgerton House,
which plays a big role on the show.
- [Lady Whistledown] The household
of the widowed Viscountess Bridgerton.
- So this is a Georgian style house
and the Georgian style basically took place
between the years 1710 and 1830.
It was named after the four kings named George,
right before the age of Queen Victoria.
So here's what jumps out at me.
It's a central block building..
It's got these two flanking wings with these curved ends,
kind of like the apse of a church.
There's this molding that connects the two wings
called a waterline that goes all the way around
and it looks like it's made out of marble
or some sort of stone, and that connects the three pieces
of the building and makes it one compositional whole.
And it's got this very classical entrance
with this pediment and columns.
Brick was very common for a typical upper middle class house
of the period, one that is not a grand palace,
So all of these elements make me believe
that this is a less ostentatious type of family
than the others that are seen on the show.
- All of you at one table, even the children.
- I realize it may be unfashionable, but we like each other.
- So another thing that characterizes Georgian architecture,
it's quite often a single block that you could see here
and then quite often they add wings to that.
The wings appear to be built out of a different kind
of brick, which leads me to believe that they were built
at a later date, but they connect the whole thing
with this waterline piece of molding
that runs all the way through.
You could see evidence of what appears to be
four separate chimneys,
which indicates four separate fireplaces,
and they're symmetrical 'cause the interior of the house,
the layout would be symmetrical as well.
And the fireplaces were the only way to heat the house.
So the windows are a traditional double hung window,
which means one window slides up in front of the other.
Glass was expensive.
It was very difficult to get large pieces.
You could still make big windows,
but they were always comprised of these smaller panes.
Compared to the rest of the houses on this show,
this is actually one of the more humble ones.
It's the only one that's out of brick,
and I think it symbolizes the people
who are sort of striving to be in the upper echelon
of this Georgian English society.
- The others are certainly very grand and impressive,
but this one is intimate.
- Also this image feels a little strange to me,
and that's because a lot of what's here doesn't exist.
the buildings at the sides don't exist,
all this ivy doesn't exist, nor does any of this wisteria,
and that's what gives it this almost artificial feel to it.
- I'm sure we can find a solution to these difficulties,
and I thank you for bringing them to our attention.
- Your Grace.
- The Duke of Hastings residence.
- [Lady Whistledown] The new Duke of Hastings
continues to grace our fair city with his presence.
- So this residence has a lot of weird features
that are confusing to me.
So in the show, they use this as what's seemingly
the entrance to the home.
Everything about it looks like it's the back
of a fancy building.
The stone is of lesser quality, the windows are smaller,
there's no grand entrance.
Everything that you would find on a typical palace
or palatial house of that era is missing from this facade.
An interesting thing they did here
is they perched these two peaked roof pieces
on either end, and it's curious what happens in there.
They've got blank facades here and here.
So you're not really sure, is this an attic space?
Is this a living space? It's hard to understand what it is.
It almost looks industrial.
Another interesting thing is that you could see this lantern
or belt tower or some sort of cupola over here,
which is in a funny place, which indicates to me
that the is facade on the left
actually is the front of the house
and that cupola is probably stationed
directly over the main ceremonial entrance.
And in reality, the reason it looks like it's the back
of a fancy building is because it is the back
of a fancy building.
So this is a real location.
It's actually called Wilton House by Inigo Jones,
and it's a fantastic and beautiful piece of architecture,
which makes me wonder why they didn't
focus more on the front.
There's a garden wall off to the left
with these crenellations, like on the top of a castle.
There's a very formal garden in the front,
almost French in nature, not very English.
Oh, and there's this big, beautiful fountain in the middle
that appears to me is powered
by modern day pressurized technology.
A fountain from this era would not be this powerful,
it would probably just gurgle out.
So what I also find really interesting about this
is that central piece over the arched entrance
and then above that is this very large window
with stone mullions.
The two flanking wings have typical wooden windows
with small panes, but in the central block of the house,
they divide the masonry openings
with these really narrow stone mullions.
It's more expensive to make these divisions out of stone
than it would be to make them out of wood,
so it just indicates someone of greater wealth lives there.
- And I must say I'm impressed.
- Next up, let's look at the Baron Featherington household.
This is a little different style.
It feels very Italianate. It doesn't feel Georgian at all.
It almost feels Mannerist.
- Striking taste.
- What a compliment, Lady Featherington.
- The Mannerist style of architecture was developed
by Michelangelo at the end of the Italian Renaissance.
He took all these sort of classical elements
that were used in the Renaissance and he started to do them
in a different way.
It's got pediments over each window
as well as the pediment over the central door opening.
There were these big volutes or scrolls
that hold up the pediments over each window.
That's a very Michelangelo move.
And then they have these big medallions
with sculpture on it and they drape this garland over it,
which is a very strange and very unique move,
let's put it that way.
So the windows are double hung, they're 6 over 6.
In this case, the window panes feel a little larger
than typical, which indicates somebody
of greater wealth lives here.
The building appears to be made out of limestone.
At the lowest level, you would expect to see it
with heavy rusticated joints, and you don't, actually.
These are really tight joints
and it forms a very smooth facade.
And the baluster above is rusticated.
That's sort of the inverse of how you'd expect to see it.
Those sort of articulated or rusticated bases,
I should say, again, is very common
in this type of architecture and it represents
sort of what's closest to the ground is heavier,
more part of the earth that's growing out of the ground
and it gets lighter as it goes up.
There's a lot of elements to this home
that kind of feel bizarre to me.
For instance, these medallions seem very crowded
between the windows, the articulated entablature
above the smooth base of the building,
it just doesn't feel right.
The reason this looks so funny to me
is because it's actually been made up in post-production.
This location is the end of the Royal Crescent in Bath
in the United Kingdom, which is actually
a much more stripped down version
of this style of architecture.
And in in fact, this rusticated entablature
with these balusters don't exist, these pediments
above the windows don't exist, nor do these medallions
with the garland hanging over them exist.
In fact, you could see the actual three stone lintel
that make up the flat arch that creates the opening
for the windows just by behind these pediments.
Actually, this one was my least favorite of all the homes
that we looked at on "Bridgerton,"
because it just seemed so weird to me, and now we know why.
- Everything you saw, none of it was real.
- Next up, let's take a look at Lady Danbury's house.
Okay, so the first thing that jumps out at me
is this looks like a Palladian villa.
It's got the rusticated base,
it has the large central floor,
which is called the piano nobile,
with the big large windows,
and it's got the pediment that protrudes out
with the four columns supporting it,
and then it has an attic level above that
and then this sort of baluster at the roof
that almost looks like a widows walk from another era.
So what's interesting to me is you could see
these medallions again with the garland hanging down,
which we just saw on the Featherington household,
and it's quite obvious that they just sort of
cut and pasted these elements
and put them on the previous building
that we were talking about.
- A highly unlikely pairing, if I may say so.
- So in this example, you could see that this pediment
is actual and it's not covering up another kind of lintel
behind it, as they did in the Featherington household
that we just saw.
So this to me clearly is a Palladian Villa.
There's very few styles of architecture
that are actually named after architects,
and Palladio is one of them.
He was an architect in the 1500s in Italy
and he actually wrote a treatise
called the Four Books of Architecture,
wherein he lays out all the rules and the laws
for composing and designing in the classical style,
which means the Greek and Roman style of architecture.
In the Georgian period, his style of architecture
was very popular and he was copied by all of the architects
working at that time.
These buildings would be sitting out in a huge green field
that you could see from a great distance
and they were always symmetrical.
All four facades quite often would be the same.
And it was very fashionable in Georgian England
to have one of these buildings.
There's Mereworth Castle and there's Chiswick House,
which are two other examples of the Palladian Villa style.
So the capitals of these columns
compared to the the capitals of the columns
at the lower level are much more ornate,
and that's another Palladian move
that he took from the Romans where the orders of columns,
doric, ionic, and corinthian, ascend with each floor
as it goes higher.
So the lower orders, doric, is closer to the ground,
the higher orders, corinthian, is higher up on the building.
This is clearly a home that's meant
for a very wealthy family and the details are stunning.
- I rather think so, too.
- Let's take a look at Clyvedon Estate.
[bright relaxing music]
- Welcome to Clyvedon, Your Grace.
- Okay, this is a big castle.
There's a big lantern up top, this big dome,
but there's also these pairs of columns,
so there's four pairs of columns.
Between them, there are niches for statuary and sculpture,
and then that statuary and sculpture
is repeated at the roof.
There are these stone terraces that wrap completely
around this big courtyard and act as these sort of arms
that welcome you and bring you into the estate.
- When will I be able to visit Clyvedon?
- So in reality, this is the Castle Howard
by an architect named John Vanbrugh
and his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor.
And what's interesting is John Vanbrugh was only 35,
this is his first building,
and he had been a playwright and a soldier.
But he knew sort of people in the right places
and he got this commission.
And the first thing he did when he got this commission
was demolish the town that was already there.
So this town called Henderskelfe was completely razed
and removed so that they could build this palatial estate.
It gives a whole new meaning to eminent domain.
So you could see on the side wing, what jumps out at me
right away is it's much more stripped down.
They kept the sort of rusticated design elements
from the main block, and then they just did the entire wing
out of that same motif.
The entrance is recessed,
almost like a tympanum with this arched doorway.
It's a series of arched windows with large lintels
and arches above each one,
and then these small, square windows above that.
It's really stripped down. It's almost military in feel.
And then everything above the roof line is sort of ornate
and has this elaborate stonework.
And most likely that roof of that lantern
is made out of lead-coated copper.
Lead is very pliable and easy to work as a metal,
but it's also extremely dangerous and toxic.
It's considered so toxic
that they don't even mine it anymore
and it's very, very difficult to get.
So in this close up view, you could see the ionic columns
supporting the entrance porch roof, as it were,
and you could see all this beautiful stonework
around the windows.
All these homes are built out of limestone,
except for the Bridgerton House,
which was built out of brick.
Obviously limestone is a much more expensive material
and you can make great things from it,
including all these sculptures
and all this ornamental stone work.
And all of it would've been hand carved
by very, very talented craftsmen and artists.
So they do show the interior briefly,
and again, it's a series of four arches
holding up this central dome and the space between the dome
and the arches are called the pendentives,
those triangular pieces, and they have paintings on those
and they even have paintings on the dome,
which is very reminiscent of like a Baroque church
that you would find in Rome.
And a building such as this can only be built
by someone of great wealth.
- I'm not sure either of us ever imagined
a house as grand as this one.
- Now let's talk about the Royal Crescent.
A lot of the exteriors on this show were shot
in Bath in England, which by the way is a city
that was started by the Romans because of the mineral baths
that were there, and that's how it gets its name.
The main thing I see here is that
this is the Royal Crescent.
One of the great examples of urban design,
it was built by John Wood the Younger.
His father, John Wood the Elder, built the circus,
which is this circular square, as it were,
also in Bath, just down the street.
So on the show, they show it as sort of like a high street
and people are strolling through,
but in reality, it's separate homes but they're combined
into one huge move and they create
this sort of palatial unity
and you get this really great room in the heart of the city
by building this fantastic radial arc.
There's this very stripped down base along the street,
then there's all these columns that form the arc,
and then above the columns,
there's this very strong entablature with a cornice,
a protruding cornice on that,
and then a balustrade at the roof level.
You could see this protruding cornice,
this dentil molding on it, and it's called a dentil molding
because it looks like teeth.
Each of these chimneys is actually the party wall
between each apartment and then above each chimney
you could see the flues from each apartment coming out,
representing how many fireplaces there are in each house.
And so most likely, adjacent residences were sharing
the party wall and sharing the chimney,
and both their fireplaces come up in each one.
So this is a great example of urban planning,
where you've created this beautiful big room
and this big green space.
John Wood the Younger's father first built
this circular space just to the east, I believe,
then it's connected by this straight row
and then you emerge onto this huge crescent.
In a way it's very reminiscent of the square
in front of St. Peter's in Rome,
where also if you come from the side,
all of a sudden you emerge into this great big open space.
And as an urban gesture, that's a great experience,
and one that you don't typically find in most cities,
at least not at this scale.
And what's also unusual about it is there's no plantings,
it's just one great lawn, so you really feel the space.
And so I think why they used it in "Bridgerton"
is because when you show people strolling down this street,
the building itself is always present.
It's not just like a street wall that goes off
into the distance and is off to the side.
Here, it's always enveloping the characters.
There's something very beautiful about that.
And in reality, that's how it is as well.
- Exquisite.
[aristocratic music]
- So those were some of the architectural details
I noticed in "Bridgerton."
What other shows should we look at?
Let me know in the comments below.