A centuries old round house — once used as a pub, and before that a toll house — now for sale in Kettering, Northamptonshire, UK –
18th century
windmill house
A former windmill, now a private home, is for sale in Leeds, England. Here is how it looked in the early 1900s –
The windmill was built in the mid to late 18th century. A 1789 lease between the Earl of Mexborough, Peter Garforth and William Burrows makes reference to a “windmill lately built, Scott Hall Gate Close, (in possession of Joseph Ingle) and newly erected dwelling place.”
The windmill is thought to have been converted to residential use in the late 19th century. A Leeds directory from 1882 states that the house was occupied by David Lee, market gardener, and called Windmill House. Now known as the Round House, it can be yours for £295,000.
early 18th century round house
Samuel Waring, an Irish gentleman and amateur architect, drew a set of circular house plans in 1715 –
18th century windmill
The Round Tower, a listed building in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England –
The tower is believed to date back to 1790. The first record of its existence is in a 1791 lease, which says it was erected by Earl Bathurst, being part of a large estate that included Cirencester House, the Bathurst family’s ancestral seat. Then classified as a wind grist mill, the building was leased for a yearly sum of 38 pounds, 6 shillings, and 6 pence.
Because it was located quite close to the Thames & Severn Canal, whose five round houses were built during the same time period, some have posited a link between the windmill’s construction and the canal buildings: either that it was built by the same team of contractors, or that it was a copy, or that the canal’s round houses were copies.
According to the UK’s 1871 and 1881 census, a shepherd named Nevil Witts inhabited the structure, which was still deemed a windmill even though it no longer functioned as one.
les pigeonniers ronds
Icons of nobility, the massive, circular dovecotes of northern France housed pigeons rather than people –
Until the French Revolution stripped the aristocracy of its traditional privileges, only members of the nobility were allowed to keep pigeons. “To house the birds, magnificent castle tower-like structures were constructed. From the 13th century until the 1789 French Revolution, ten [of] thousands of these pigeonries existed in Northern France, yet today only a few hundred remain. After the French Revolution, many ‘pigeonniers’ were destroyed as symbols of the feudal past.”
Those that escaped destruction still dot the French countryside — large, imposing, nearly windowless towers whose interiors are filled with hundreds of small niches.
a surreal folie
The Broken Column house was built in about 1780 by aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville, who lived there until the French Revolution –
Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, visited the house, taking notes for the construction of her own folie at Versailles.
Thomas Jefferson, who visited the house while he was Minister to France, was said to have been particularly taken by it. “How grand the idea excited by the remains of such a column!” Jefferson wrote to Maria Cosway, the painter with whom he visited the house.
round houses 