page_title: Cragside
section_title: Architecture and description
hierarchical_section_title: Cragside / Architecture and description
caption_attribution_description: English: Visitors Entrance Cragside
context_page_description: Cragside is a Victorian country house near the town of Rothbury in Northumberland, England. It was the home of William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong, founder of the Armstrong Whitworth armaments firm. An industrial magnate, scientist, philanthropist and inventor of the hydraulic crane and the Armstrong gun, Armstrong also displayed his inventiveness in the domestic sphere, making Cragside the first house in the world to be lit using hydroelectric power. The estate was technologically advanced; the architect of the house, Richard Norman Shaw, wrote that it was equipped with "wonderful hydraulic machines that do all sorts of things". In the grounds, Armstrong built dams and lakes to power a sawmill, a water-powered laundry, early versions of a dishwasher and a dumb waiter, a hydraulic lift and a hydroelectric rotisserie. In 1887, Armstrong was raised to the peerage, the first engineer or scientist to be ennobled, and became Baron Armstrong of Cragside.
  The original building consisted of a small shooting lodge which Armstrong built between 1862 and 1864.
context_section_description: Cragside is an example of Shaw's Tudor revival style; the Pevsner Architectural Guide for Northumberland called it "the most dramatic Victorian mansion in the North of England". The entrance front was described by Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel as "one of the most dramatic compositions in all architecture", and the architectural historian James Stevens Curl regarded the house as "an extraordinarily accomplished Picturesque composition". Criticism focuses on the building's lack of overall coherence; in The National Trust Book of the English House, Aslet and Powers describe the house as "large and meandering", and the architectural critics Dixon and Muthesius write that "the plan rambles along the hillside". Saint is even more dismissive: for him, "the plan of Cragside is little better than a straggle". The half-timbering above the entrance has also been criticised as unfaithful to the vernacular tradition of the North-East. Shaw would have been unconcerned; desiring it for "romantic effect, he reached out for it like an artist reaching out for a tube of colour".
  The architectural historian J. Mordaunt Crook considers Cragside to be one of the very few country houses built by the Victorian commercial plutocracy that was truly "avant-garde or trend-setting". In his study, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches, Crook contends that many new-monied owners were too domineering, and generally chose second-rate architects, as these tended to be more "pliant", allowing the clients to get their own way, rather than those of the first rank such as Shaw. The Rhenish flavour of the house makes a notable contrast with a country house that was almost contemporaneous with Cragside: the Villa Hügel constructed by Armstrong's greatest rival, Alfred Krupp. While Armstrong's Northumbrian fastness drew on Teutonic inspirations, his German competitor designed and built a house that was an exercise in neoclassicism.
  The location for the house was described by Mark Girouard as "a lunatic site". Pevsner and Richmond call both the setting and the house Wagnerian. The ledge on which it stands is narrow, and space for the repeated expansions could only be found by dynamiting the rock face behind, or by building upwards. Such challenges only drove Armstrong on, and overcoming the technical barriers to construction gave him great pleasure. His task was made easier by the use of the workforce and the technology of the Elswick Works. The architectural historian Jill Franklin notes that the vertiginous fall of the site is so steep that the drawing room, on a level with the first-floor landing at the front of the house, meets the rock face at the back.
  Jenkins describes the plan of the house as "simpler than the exterior suggests". The majority of the reception rooms are located on the ground floor, as are the accompanying service rooms. The exception is the large extension Shaw added to the south-east from 1882. This includes the drawing room, completed for the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, in August 1884.
  The house has been a Grade I listed building since 21 October 1953, the listing citing inter alia its "largely complete Victorian interior".  The architectural correspondent of The Times, Marcus Binney, who was closely involved in the campaign to bring Cragside to the National Trust, noted the historic importance of this "virtually untouched interior", with its collections of furnishings, furniture (much designed especially for Cragside), and fine and decorative arts, with work by many notable designers of the period, including William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Philip Webb and Edward Burne-Jones. Pevsner notes that the art collection demonstrated "what was permissible to the Victorian nobleman in the way of erotica".
caption: The entrance front –  Shaw's "Wagnerian"[14] overture
exif: {}