John Nash (architect) - Return To London

Return To London

In June 1797 he moved into 28 Dover Street a building of his own design, he built an even bigger house next door at 29 into which he moved the following year. Nash married 25-year-old Mary Ann Bradley on 17 December 1798 at St George's, Hanover Square. In 1798 he purchased a plot of land of 30 acres (120,000 m2) at East Cowes on which he erected 1798-1802 East Cowes Castle as his residence. It was the first of a series of picturesque Gothic castles that he would design.

Nash's final home in London was No.14 Regent street that he designed and built 1819-23, No.16 was built at the same time as Nash's cousin John Edwards's (who was a lawyer and handled all Nash's legal affairs)home. Located in lower Regent Street, near Waterloo Place, both houses formed a single design around an open courtyard, Nash's drawing office was on the ground floor, on the first floor was the finest room in the house, the 70 feet long picture and sculpture gallery, this linked the drawing room at the front of the building with the dining room at the rear. The house was sold in 1834 and the gallery interior moved to East Cowes Castle.

The finest of the dozen country houses that Nash designed as picturesque castles include, the relatively small Luscombe Castle Devon (1800–04), Ravensworth Castle (Tyne and Wear) begun 1807 only finally completed in 1846, was one of the largest houses by Nash, Caerhays Castle in Cornwall (1808–10), Shanbally Castle, County Tipperary (1818–1819) was the last of these castles to be built. These buildings all represented Nash's continuing development of an asymmetrical and picturesque architectural style, that had begun during his years in Wales, at both Castle House Aberystwyth and his alterations to Hafod Uchtryd. This process would be extended by Nash in planning groups of buildings, the first example being Blaise Hamlet (1810–1811), here a group of nine asymmetrical cottages were laid out around a village green, Nikolaus Pevsner described the hamlet as 'the ne plus ultra of the Picturesque movement'. Nash developed the assymmetry of his castles in his Italinate villas, his first such exercise was Cronkhill (1802), others included Sandridge Park (1805) and Southborough Place, Surbiton, (1808).

He advised on work to the buildings of Jesus College, Oxford in 1815, for which he required no fee but asked that the college should commission a portrait of him from Sir Thomas Lawrence to hang in the college hall.