So much of the DNA of the most beautiful conservatories available on the market today can be found in old daguerreotypes and the sepia-toned pages of history.
The Victorian age was a period of rapid and intense progress in a lot of different technological and cultural fields, and one of the best ways to capture this breadth of progress is through the bounteous and exotic colourful plants and flowers that bloomed for the first time in England thanks to the conservatory.
Such was the love of gardening and exotic horticulture that it created a Golden Age of Conservatories that not only revolutionised our relationships with our gardens but created an influential design language that is still followed today even after many of its most influential designs have been dismantled.
Rise, Fall And Rise Again
The first prototypical orangery was made in 1545 in Padua, Northern Italy, with the express purpose of helping to keep citrus trees alive during the much harsher winter months away from the Mediterranean.
Similar systems were developed in the 17th century in England such as Kensington Palace’s Orangery from 1705, but by the 19th century, the concept had evolved along with the technology and its most common uses.
Rather than simply being a place to store exotic plants in winter, a conservatory was an indoor extension of the garden and a social destination in its own right.
Once glass production improved to the point that much more of the surface area of the building could be made with a lattice of steel and glass, ambitious architects and industrial engineers started to push the limits of what was possible with conservatory design.
The Great Conservatories of Syon House and Chatsworth House were hugely elaborate, ambitious trend-setting buildings based in large country houses that showed what could be done with glass that could not have been done before with brickwork and large vertical windows.
These two conservatories created a trend not only amongst the landed gentry for having a conservatory to showcase unusual, vibrant and exotic plants in an area sheltered enough to socialise and potentially even dine in, but it also made the conservatory a place to be in wider society.
The creation of grand conservatories coincided with the rise of tourism, and Kew Gardens would construct the Great Palm House would allow people to see the exoticism of nature for the price of an admission ticket.
This increased interest in conservatories as a whole and led to what was, at the time, the most ambitious conservatory ever constructed in the form of the Crystal Palace in 1851.
As the Victorian era continued, several more major conservatories were made and the concept became somewhat widespread amongst country house owners, but this would start to change by the start of the 20th century.
The major technological changes that facilitated the creation of grand conservatories would also be the catalyst for grander social changes that would cause many of them to be demolished alongside the country houses they were built.
In an era before the preservation of architectural heritage was prioritised, this was common for members of the British nobility class as circumstances changed. They were
Many noble families married into each other, giving them huge numbers of houses that were not needed and became increasingly expensive to maintain, particularly with expansions such as expensive heating systems to ensure early conservatories could house exotic hothouse plants.
During the Victorian era, this was typically accompanied by elaborate rebuilds but in the 1900s the music stopped and many country houses were torn down, along with their conservatories, and this trend accelerated uncontrollably after 1914.
Whilst the era of the English country house was already declining, the advent of the First World War was the cultural end of the circumstances that allowed Victorian conservatories to exist at the scale that they did.
The most extreme example of this changing trend was at Chatsworth House, which was torn down in 1920, having been reduced to a shell of its former self due to the rationing of the coal needed to power the hothouse furnaces, leading to the deaths of all of its exotic plants.
Whilst not intentionally demolished, the devastating fire that razed Crystal Palace was symbolic of the end of the Golden Age, as the greatest conservatory ever built burned down in just one night in an event described by Winston Churchill as the “end of an age”.
By the Second World War, the vast majority of conservatory production had come to a halt, but within three decades it had returned thanks to the development of double glazing, and designers turned to the legendary landmarks of the past when it came to developing the conservatories we see today.