Italianate Architecture. The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian Renaissance architecture, synthesising these with picturesque aesthetics. The style of architecture that was thus created, though also characterised as Neo-Renaissance, was essentially of its own time. The backward look transforms its object, Siegfried Giedion wrote of historicist architectural styles; every spectator at every period, at every moment, indeed, inevitably transforms the past according to his own nature. The Italianate style was first developed in Britain in about 1802 by John Nash, with the construction of Cronkhill in Shropshire. This small country house is generally accepted to be the first Italianate villa in England, from which is derived the Italianate architecture of the late Regency and early Victorian eras. The Italianate style was further developed and popularised by the architect Sir Charles Barry in the 1830s. Barry's Italianate style drew heavily for its motifs on the buildings of the Italian Renaissance, though sometimes at odds with Nash's semi-rustic Italianate villas. The style was not confined to England and was employed in varying forms, long after its decline in popularity in Britain, throughout Northern Europe and the British Empire. From the late 1840s to 1890 it achieved huge popularity in the United States, where it was promoted by the architect Alexander Jackson Davis. Key visual components of this style include: Low-pitched or flat roofs; roof is frequently hipped; Projecting eaves supported by corbels; Imposing cornice structures; Pedimented windows and doors; Arch-headed, pedimented or Serlian windows with pronounced architraves and archivolts; Tall first floor windows suggesting a piano nobile; Belvedere or machicolated signorial towers; Cupolas; Quoins; Loggias; and Balustrades concealing the roof-scape. About 15% of Italianate houses in the United States include a tower. A late intimation of John Nash's development of the Italianate style was his 1805 design of Sandridge Park at Stoke Gabriel in Devon. Commissioned by the dowager Lady Ashburton as a country retreat, this small country house clearly shows the transition between the picturesque of William Gilpin and Nash's yet to be fully evolved Italianism. While this house can still be described as Regency, its informal asymmetrical plan together with its loggias and balconies of both stone and wrought iron; tower and low pitched roof clearly are very similar to the fully Italianate design of Cronkhill, the house generally considered to be the first example of the Italianate style in Britain. Later examples of the Italianate style in England tend to take the form of Palladian-style building often enhanced by a belvedere tower complete with Renaissance-type balustrading at the roof level. This is generally a more stylistic interpretation of what architects and patrons imagined to be the case in Italy, and utilises more obviously the Italian Renaissance motifs than those earlier examples of the Italianate style by Nash. Sir Charles Barry, most notable for his works on the Tudor and Gothic styles at the Houses of Parliament in London, was a great promoter of the style. Unlike Nash, he found his inspiration in Italy itself. Barry drew heavily on the designs of the original Renaissance villas of Rome, the Lazio and the Veneto or as he put it: .the charming character of the irregular villas of Italy. His most defining work in this style was the large Neo-Renaissance mansion Cliveden, while the Reform Club 1837-41 in Pall Mall represents a convincingly authentic pastiche of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, albeit in a grecian Ionic order in place of Michelangelo's original Corinthian order. Although it has been claimed that one-third of early Victorian country houses in England used classical styles, mostly Italianate, by 1855 the style was falling from favour and Cliveden came to be regarded as a declining essay in a declining fashion.