Wollaton Hall

Our project theme was based from ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by Edgar Allan Poe, which is set in an abbey but we adjusted that for us so instead if would be a grand, Victorian manor house. We thought it would be great if we could get some first hand pictures and research rather than just information off the internet.

Luckily for us, we were fairly close enough to Wollaton Hall, located in Nottingham. It was completed in 1588 and is in the English Renaissance style and is quite flamboyant in it’s design. The interior has been remodelled multiple times but the exterior remains unaltered from when it was built.

Interesting fact, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ film by Christopher Nolan used Wollaton Hall as one of it’s filming locations as Wayne Manor!

Even though Wollaton Hall wasn’t built in the same style as what we were planning on creating our project in (ours was to be done in the Gothic Revival period/style), there was still plenty that we could take inspiration from and just help add to our information and knowledge. We look at the room layouts and take interesting texture photos that we could directly use in our project.

There was also other interesting rooms like an insect gallery and bird gallery among others, which may not directly connect to our project or be relevant to us (immediately) but it was definitely interesting to look at and take photos of, which all helps.

'Masque of the Red Death' by Edgar Allan Poe - The theme

For the project, we got different themes from which we could base our work on. These were Whitby, which was the setting for Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by Edgar Allan Poe and finally, ‘Fonthill Abbey,’ which was a 18^th Century Country House.

A film, based on Edgar Allan Poe's story from 1964.

We chose to do ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ which is a short gothic story about Prince Prospero that follows his attempts to avoid the Red Death, a dangerous plague that is spreading across the land, in his abbey along with other noblemen.

 

There were some themes or notable points of interest, which we took from the story and incorporated into our project. These were:

§        7 rooms (or 7 main rooms) all with different colours and themes (blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet and red/black).

§        The Clock in the ballroom.

§        The rooms being built running from east to west (following the path of the sun).

§        The figure appearing in the ballroom – Red Death.

We thought that we try and fit these into our project. Although, we could experiment a bit with the rooms since it doesn’t mention too much what each of the rooms were, rather just the colours of that chamber. We stuck to fairly traditional rooms though, which included a study, bedroom and dining room. The only one that we couldn’t differentiate from was the ballroom, since that was the feature room and would be the main finale. It was described the most in detail as well in comparison to the other rooms so we had to take into account the windows and ceiling (since we are trying to make it fairly accurate and close to how it is described in the story).

Here are some pieces from our research looking at the colour palettes and themes.

The colour palette and style for each of the rooms