Great house

A great house is a large house or mansion with luxurious appointments and great retinues of indoor and outdoor staff, especially those of the turn of the 20th century (i.e., the late Victorian or Edwardian era in the United Kingdom and the Gilded Age in the United States). Examples include the English country house and the homes of various "millionaires' row" (or "millionaires' mile") in some U.S. cities such as Newport, Rhode Island. In Ireland, the term big house is usual for the houses of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. By some reports, the summer homes of the wealthy at Newport averaged four servants per family member. There was often an elaborate hierarchy among staff, domestic workers in particular.

It was considered declassé to refer to one's own townhouses, estates or villas (or those of friends) as mansions and modern etiquette books still advise that the terms house, big house or great house be used instead.

As in the past, today's great houses are limited to heads of state, the very rich, or those who have inherited them; few in the developed world are staffed at the level of past centuries. The International Guild of Butlers estimates that the annual salaries of a 20-25 person household staff total in excess of US$1,000,000.

Great house (disambiguation)

Great house is a term for a large residence and the associated household, especially in the context of the Victorian and Edwardian era.

Great house or Great House may also refer to:

in fiction:

See also

Great house (pueblo)

A great house is a large, multi-storied Ancestral Puebloan structure; they were built between 850 and 1150. Archeologists differ as to their purpose, but they might have been residences for large numbers of people, or ceremonial centers that only priests occupied. Archeologist Stephen H. Lekson has proposed that they might have been the palaces of Puebloan royalty, particularly those found at Chaco Canyon.

Whereas the term "great house" typically refers to structures in Chaco Canyon, they are also found in more northerly locations in the San Juan Basin, including the Mesa Verde region, where great house construction flourished during the late 11th and early 12th centuries, and may have begun as early as 800. Mesa Verdeans usually built their great houses on the site of older villages.

References

Great House (Cape Ann)

When the Thomas Gardner (planter) party of "old planters" came to Cape Ann to establish a fishing colony, they arrived with the necessary provisions to become self-sustaining and to ship seafood product back to England. The area turned out to not allow easy success at the endeavor, but a little-known accomplishment of the small group was to build a house that was the first of its kind in New England. One author wrote: It has been quaintly described by an early writer as "of the model in England first called Tudor, and afterwards the Elizabethan, which was essentially Gothic." It was of two stories with a sharp pitch-roof.

Origins

Information about its origin is scanty, but a lot of the material came with the party. Some material, such as lumber pieces, may have been produced locally. One later observer mentioned that the framing looked to be designed for transportation. When Roger Conant arrived at Cape Ann in 1625, the house was already there. Roger's son, Lot, is thought to have been born in the house.

Great House (novel)

Great House is the third novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published on October 12, 2010 by W. W. Norton & Company. Early versions of the first chapter were published in Harper's ("From the Desk of Daniel Varsky", 2007), Best American Short Stories 2008, and The New Yorker ("The Young Painters", June 2010). Great House was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Fiction.

Book description

For 25 years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.

Linking these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away.

Great House (St. Augustine, Maryland)

Great House is a historic home located at St. Augustine, Cecil County, Maryland, United States. It is a large two story brick dwelling constructed in the second quarter of the 18th century. The house retains virtually all its original interior detailing and hardware.

Great House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

References

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