The greatest conservatory designs that you can buy today are those created by experts inspired by the beautiful and elegant traditional sunrooms of the Victorian era.
The era of the so-called Great Conservatories, often described as an outright Golden Age for glass construction, includes designs such as the Great Palm House at Kew Gardens, the Great Conservatories of Chatsworth House and Syon Park, as well as the famous Crystal Palace in Hyde Park.
From this era, which started around the time of Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838 up until the First World War, the purpose, shape and size of conservatories changed quite dramatically, and to understand why this is the case, as well as why modern designers look back at this golden age, we need to understand the motivations for making such great glass sunrooms.
From Apples To Oranges
The earliest conservatories are almost unrecognisable from the designs we see today, and their reason to exist was more akin to a greenhouse than a sunroom.
The initial impetus for making conservatories was as a result of the Age of Sail, where merchant ships and traders had started to bring exotic plants, fruits and vegetables from around the world to Europe.
In particular, the popularity of citrus fruits such as lemons and oranges inspired landowners with enough wealth and space to cultivate a large, varied garden to start trying to cultivate their own.
This was fine during balmy Mediterranean summers, but once the winter months hit, the tropical flowers and fruit trees simply wilted and died in the cold.
The earliest solutions, known as “limonaia” in Italy and orangeries everywhere else, were initially fairly simple wooden structures built over the top of citrus tree plants to give some form of winter weather protection as an alternative to simply moving them indoors where they would remain a bit warmer.
The earliest known example of a dedicated conservatory, based in Padua, Northern Italy, was a very basic structure, barely more complex in design than planting the orange trees against a brick wall with a tarpaulin thrown over them, or storing them in big square boxes to carry them into a house.
These would become south-facing brick buildings with huge, tall windows on the south-facing wall with no windows on the other side. The idea was to keep as much heat in the conservatory structure as possible without it escaping, often leading to thick materials and insulation being used, alongside underfloor heating.
Early orangeries such as the one at Kensington Palace highlight the primary design philosophy of the era. This was most famously seen in places such as the Gardens of Versailles, a particularly elaborate garden space which also saw a shift in the purpose of the orangery.
It was not just about having a space to protect exotic plants and to view them as they were growing but also became an entertainment space in its own right.
Exotic plants have always been a conversation piece, and these rooms began to be used to entertain guests, showcasing verdant exotic beauty, hosting guests and even providing the opportunity to lounge or dine, setting the stage for how conservatories are used today.
However, as technological advances made structural glass and iron made it far more possible to have predominantly glazed structures, the orangery started to shift into the conservatory, and how it was used would change dramatically.
It started with the use of sloping glass rather than the tall, south-facing walls traditionally used by orangeries, which became hugely influential in how English conservatories were constructed.
By this point, the relatively modest (by country house standards) designs of orangeries had been superseded by increasingly advanced and sophisticated conservatory buildings designed to effectively do the impossible.
In a country like England, which has relatively warm summers but otherwise has quite bitterly cold weather, conservatories became hugely popular showpieces for country houses and later tourist attractions in their own right, showcasing exotic plants, flowers and animals from around the world.
This led to conservatories that were not just for keeping exotic plants safe, but also were grand monuments to technological progress in their own right, places to entertain and enjoy yourself, and an aesthetically pleasing way to enjoy your garden whilst being protected from summer rain.
Conservatories became more popular both as large structures and as smaller domestic sunrooms until the advent of the First World War. The amount of coal and fuel many larger conservatories needed made them expensive to run, and many country houses either closed or dismantled them entirely to save money.
That only changed in the 1970s when the rise of double glazing and more sophisticated insulation made conservatories more popular than ever before.