Chimneypiece. The Drawing Room, Cragside, Northumberland
The drawing room was constructed in the 1880s phase of building, when Armstrong had sold his Jesmond house and was residing solely at Cragside. Aslet suggests that the inspiration for the design was the great hall at Haddon Hall, Derbyshire, although Saint considers Shaw’s Dawpool Hall, Cheshire as the more likely source. Pevsner and Richmond mention Hardwick Hall and Hatfield House as possible models for the “spectacular” overall design. The room contains a colossal marble inglenook chimneypiece, reputed to weigh ten tons, and designed by Shaw’s assistant, W. R. Lethaby. Muthesius describes the fireplace as a “splendid example … with finely composed relief decoration”. Jenkins considers it “surely the world’s biggest inglenook” and describes the overall impact of the room as “sensational”, noting the top-lit ceiling and the elaborate Jacobethan plasterwork. Others have been less complimentary; the writer Reginald Turnor, no admirer either of Shaw or of Victorian architecture and its architects more generally, wrote of the room’s “flamboyant and rather sickening detail”. By the time of its construction, Shaw, increasingly working for clients of great wealth, had moved on from his “Old English” style, and the room is designed and decorated in a grander and more opulent Renaissance taste.