Area (architecture)

Area is the name given in architecture to an excavated, subterranean space around the walls of a building, designed to admit light into a basement

Basement

__FORCETOC__A basement is one or more floors of a building that are either completely or partially below the ground floor. Basements are typically used as a utility space for a building where such items as the furnace, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, car park, and air-conditioning system...

, often providing access to the house for tradesmen and deliveries and access to vaults beneath the pavement for storage of coal and ash.

Function

The term is most commonly applied to urban houses of the Georgian period in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, where it was normal for the service rooms, such as the kitchen

Kitchen

A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation.In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a...

, scullery

Scullery

Scullery may refer to:*Dishwashing*Scullery * Scullery maid...

 and laundry

Laundry

Laundry is a noun that refers to the act of washing clothing and linens, the place where that washing is done, and/or that which needs to be, is being, or has been laundered...

, to be in the basement. Areas were commonly enclosed for safety reasons by wrought iron or cast iron railings, which became one of the principal decorative features of the astylar

Astylar

Astylar is an architectural term given to a class of design in which neither columns nor pilasters are used for decorative purposes; thus the Riccardi and Strozzi palaces in Florence are astylar in their design, in contradistinction to Palladio's palaces at Vicenza, which are columnar....

 terraced house

Terraced house

In architecture and city planning, a terrace house, terrace, row house, linked house or townhouse is a style of medium-density housing that originated in Great Britain in the late 17th century, where a row of identical or mirror-image houses share side walls...

s of this period. Areas are also found in the English and French country house, where basements were popular in the 18th century as a way of accommodating service functions while allowing all four faces of a symmetrical Classical building to relate directly to its landscape setting, as at Mereworth Castle

Mereworth Castle

Mereworth Castle is a grade I listed Palladian country house in Mereworth, Kent, England.Originally the site of a fortified manor licensed in 1332, the present building is not actually a castle, but was built in the 1720s as an almost exact copy of Palladio's Villa Rotunda. It was designed in 1723...

 in Kent

Kent

Kent is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the Thames Estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent and the unitary borough of...

 or The Abbey, Skirwith

The Abbey, Skirwith

The Abbey in the village of Skirwith in Cumbria, England, UK is a two storey Classical house of five by three bays, built by Thomas Addison, mason, in 1768-74 for John Orfeur Yates, who spent many years in India. The main front has more closely spaced windows in the centre; and the centre and...

 in Cumberland

Cumberland

Cumberland is a historic county of North West England, on the border with Scotland, from the 12th century until 1974. It formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974 and now forms part of Cumbria....

. Basements, and consequently areas, decreased in popularity in the 19th century, as attitudes to servants changed, although they continued to be constructed as service accommodation in urban settings where land was at a premium until the early 20th century. A suburban residential application can be seen at the Gamble House in Pasadena

Pasadena, California

Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...

, California, to light the laundry and service areas of the expansive basement.

Cruickshank and Burton (p83) say that it is significant that in early 18th-century house descriptions, the area was usually called the "airy", which suggests that its primary function was ventilation, needed to prevent cooking smells from percolating upstairs to the rooms above. This implies that the term "area" was a corruption of "airey" rather than vice-versa.

The airey

In north London this lightwell

Lightwell

In architecture a lightwell, light well or air shaft is an unroofed external space provided within the volume of a large building to allow light and air to reach what would otherwise be dark or unventilated area...

was known colloquially as "the airey". It is a subject of an old-time children's ball-bouncing rhyme that begins:

"One, two, three, alairy

My ball is down the airey

Don't forget to give it to Mary

Early in the morning".