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beatrice_otter) wrote2025-01-20 10:09 pm
beatrice_otter) wrote2025-01-20 10:09 pm
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How Big Is Wayne Manor, and how is it arranged?
Most people (at least most Americans) have never been in a grand Stately Home of the scale Wayne Manor is supposed to be. We just don't know much about what they're like. There was a very brief era (the Gilded/Robber Baron age) where they were built. Rich people now who build grand piles tend to just do McMansions on steroids, and those are different than the earlier mansions, in a lot of ways.
The major difference is that building a house that big actually had a purpose in the pre-20th-Century era, so the layout of the house is going to make sense, and the rooms will be smaller, because they're built for purposes and not just "look at me, I'm fuck-off huge!"
In the pre-20th Century, travel was hard and took a long time, so people wouldn't go visit someone just for a day or two--if they had the money and time to travel, they'd spend weeks at other peoples' homes. House parties were a thing. Invite your ten closest friends (and their spouses, and possibly any adult children they might have) plus a few of your own relatives and a couple of people who are really witty and entertaining but don't have much money, and just hang out for a week. So you needed a house that would be comfortable to house that many people, and capable of doing enough different kinds of entertaining that people wouldn't get bored. You would need bedrooms to house everybody, but in those days bedrooms (even for wealthy people) were smaller. And also, you would need a huge amount of space for the servants to live and do their work.
People today just don't entertain on that same scale; even rich people don't often host the same kind of week-long events, unless you're taking your guests to some sort of exotic location or going on a yacht or something. They still host massive parties! It's just not expected that the social circuit will involve staying in other peoples' homes and hosting them in return. And they still have staff, but mostly those staff don't live in their house, and they don't need as much space because modern equipment takes up less space to do the same work, and they don't need as many servants because modern equipment makes the work quicker and easier. So when they build a massive house, it's pretty much purely for the "see how big and grand I am, I have all this space!" except there's no reason for the space to exist. And then you add in the idea of the open-plan house, where instead of having a bunch of small and medium-sized rooms, you have big open spaces. In a reasonably sized home, it's fine. But in a mansion, it's ridiculous. You end up with ginormous rooms that don't have a purpose and you're sitting there wondering "don't you feel lost in all that space? what the heck are you supposed to DO in this room, exactly?"
Wayne Manor is from the earlier era. It's big! But most of the places the family actually spends time are probably proportioned on a human scale.
I think the Carnegie Mansion in New York is a pretty good model for what Wayne Manor might be like, except obviously Carnegie Mansion is in New York City and Wayne Manor is outside of Gotham. But it's the right era, and the right scale, so here we go.
There is a website with the architectural plans and some pictures that is very informative.
Counting the basement, there are six floors--three of them purely for servants. They are:
Basement: wine cellar and utilities (coal storage, HVAC, boilers, pumps, etc). Yes, the building had an HVAC system when it was built in 1902.
Ground floor (the one with the windows right at ground level, so the floor itself is below ground level): all the servant work areas. Kitchen, laundry, servants' dining room, offices for the senior servants, etc. Having the ground floor be sunk into the ground serves several purposes: one, you can have windows so you get a lot of natural light in the kitchens and work area, and when the servants are doing heavy work and hauling stuff around the family probably isn't going to hear them. Having the service stuff and the utilities near ground level makes it easier to do deliveries and such. And it's fewer steps up to the front door (and the level that the family uses) than you'd have if you put the ground floor at ground level.
First floor: public entertaining areas. Vestibule, hall, grand staircase, waiting room, library, Carnegie's office, his secretary's office, drawing room, reception room, dining room, breakfast room, picture gallery, conservatory. Also an elevator and a bathroom. Note that it doesn't have a ballroom! But then it's in the city, Wayne Manor is outside the city limits, and so might be larger.
Second floor: family living space. Note the reasonable size of the rooms. Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie each have their own bedrooms. We don't have a scale to tell us how large the rooms are, but we do have a picture of the "Family Library Room" from 1938, and it's about the size of Mr. Carnegie's bedroom. This would not be a large bedroom by modern standards. Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie share a walk-in closet, but they each have their own bathroom, and Mrs. Carnegie has a dressing room and a sitting room. There's the aforementioned Family Library Room (pictured below), a day nursery and a night nursery, the nurse's room and bathroom and pantry, and a billiard room.
Third floor: guest and family rooms. A gym, the secretary's bedroom, a school room, a sewing room, a trunk room (storage for the guests), a suite for someone named Miss Whitfield, five guest bedrooms, two guest servant rooms, and associated bathrooms.
Fourth floor: servants' bedrooms, bathrooms, and two storage rooms. Note that male and female servants areas are completely separated, and also, there are a lot more female servants than male servants. This was common; there's an estimate that around the turn of the century, around 1/3 of all women in the US worked in domestic service at some point in their lives. There were a lot more female servants out there than male servants. Also, it was almost universal that a house with live-in servants would put them on the top floor, so they're the ones having to climb the most stairs every day.
Wayne Manor is probably around this size, and it would have probably been built in the same era, or maybe a couple of decades before, depending on when exactly you think the Waynes made their money. It may be larger, it may have different sorts of public rooms (a music room instead of or in addition to a drawing room, for example), it may be built with wings instead of a solid block, it may take up more land but have fewer stories, but this should give you a vague idea of what sorts of things you should be picturing.
Here's some considerations:
Scale. The rooms will be comfortably sized for the purposes they're intended for. Some rooms will be bigger than others (a ballroom has to have more space than a bedroom), but the size will be based on how many people are intended to use the space at any one time.
No open floor plans. Instead of big rooms with different stuff in different areas, there will be a lot of different rooms. Instead of a huge bedroom with a seating area, you have a separate sitting room, that sort of thing. (This is part of why the rooms are at a comfortable scale.)
Practicalities. Fully half of that mansion is taken up by the space needed to service it. It's designed to have a small army of people taking care of the house and the family, all of the cooking and the cleaning and maintenance and stuff, because that was all a lot more labor intensive before things like vacuum cleaners, laundry machines, and dishwashers. And those areas are completely separate from the rest of the house. By and large, they aren't even on the same floor as any place the family or their guests would go. Servants work below their employers, and live above them. What this means for the batcave is up to you.
Guest vs. Family space. Most large homes had dedicated guest areas. Sometimes it was by wing, in the Carnegie mansion it was by floor, I visited a mansion once that just had a big carved wooden wall separating the half of the floor that was for the family from the half of it that was for guests.
Bathrooms. The Carnegie mansion was built in 1902, indoor plumbing was a thing (for the wealthy) by then. But even a few decades before, it wasn't, people just used chamber pots and wash stands (a small table with a bowl and a pitcher of water) instead. The problem with trying to retrofit bathrooms into a mansion built before indoor plumbing is more than just "where do you put the pipes," it's also "what rooms do you carve up to be bathrooms." Do you take a bedroom and convert it into a bathroom, and just have one really awkwardly large one? Do you take a bedroom and convert it into two bathrooms, one for the bedroom on each side of it? Do you do something else? You don't want to damage the historical molding and gorgeous decorated ceilings and the like, so you don't want to gut and remodel everything, so you're left with basically repurposing rooms that exist.
Also, I choose to headcanon that there is a staff of cleaners who comes in at least once a week, and a staff of groundskeepers ditto, because there is absolutely no way that one person could feasibly take care of all that and cook and be Batman's logistics guy. Even if the guest area is usually closed up and the servants quarters are permanently mothballed, that's a lot.
The major difference is that building a house that big actually had a purpose in the pre-20th-Century era, so the layout of the house is going to make sense, and the rooms will be smaller, because they're built for purposes and not just "look at me, I'm fuck-off huge!"
In the pre-20th Century, travel was hard and took a long time, so people wouldn't go visit someone just for a day or two--if they had the money and time to travel, they'd spend weeks at other peoples' homes. House parties were a thing. Invite your ten closest friends (and their spouses, and possibly any adult children they might have) plus a few of your own relatives and a couple of people who are really witty and entertaining but don't have much money, and just hang out for a week. So you needed a house that would be comfortable to house that many people, and capable of doing enough different kinds of entertaining that people wouldn't get bored. You would need bedrooms to house everybody, but in those days bedrooms (even for wealthy people) were smaller. And also, you would need a huge amount of space for the servants to live and do their work.
People today just don't entertain on that same scale; even rich people don't often host the same kind of week-long events, unless you're taking your guests to some sort of exotic location or going on a yacht or something. They still host massive parties! It's just not expected that the social circuit will involve staying in other peoples' homes and hosting them in return. And they still have staff, but mostly those staff don't live in their house, and they don't need as much space because modern equipment takes up less space to do the same work, and they don't need as many servants because modern equipment makes the work quicker and easier. So when they build a massive house, it's pretty much purely for the "see how big and grand I am, I have all this space!" except there's no reason for the space to exist. And then you add in the idea of the open-plan house, where instead of having a bunch of small and medium-sized rooms, you have big open spaces. In a reasonably sized home, it's fine. But in a mansion, it's ridiculous. You end up with ginormous rooms that don't have a purpose and you're sitting there wondering "don't you feel lost in all that space? what the heck are you supposed to DO in this room, exactly?"
Wayne Manor is from the earlier era. It's big! But most of the places the family actually spends time are probably proportioned on a human scale.
I think the Carnegie Mansion in New York is a pretty good model for what Wayne Manor might be like, except obviously Carnegie Mansion is in New York City and Wayne Manor is outside of Gotham. But it's the right era, and the right scale, so here we go.
There is a website with the architectural plans and some pictures that is very informative.
Counting the basement, there are six floors--three of them purely for servants. They are:
Basement: wine cellar and utilities (coal storage, HVAC, boilers, pumps, etc). Yes, the building had an HVAC system when it was built in 1902.
Ground floor (the one with the windows right at ground level, so the floor itself is below ground level): all the servant work areas. Kitchen, laundry, servants' dining room, offices for the senior servants, etc. Having the ground floor be sunk into the ground serves several purposes: one, you can have windows so you get a lot of natural light in the kitchens and work area, and when the servants are doing heavy work and hauling stuff around the family probably isn't going to hear them. Having the service stuff and the utilities near ground level makes it easier to do deliveries and such. And it's fewer steps up to the front door (and the level that the family uses) than you'd have if you put the ground floor at ground level.
First floor: public entertaining areas. Vestibule, hall, grand staircase, waiting room, library, Carnegie's office, his secretary's office, drawing room, reception room, dining room, breakfast room, picture gallery, conservatory. Also an elevator and a bathroom. Note that it doesn't have a ballroom! But then it's in the city, Wayne Manor is outside the city limits, and so might be larger.
Second floor: family living space. Note the reasonable size of the rooms. Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie each have their own bedrooms. We don't have a scale to tell us how large the rooms are, but we do have a picture of the "Family Library Room" from 1938, and it's about the size of Mr. Carnegie's bedroom. This would not be a large bedroom by modern standards. Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie share a walk-in closet, but they each have their own bathroom, and Mrs. Carnegie has a dressing room and a sitting room. There's the aforementioned Family Library Room (pictured below), a day nursery and a night nursery, the nurse's room and bathroom and pantry, and a billiard room.
Third floor: guest and family rooms. A gym, the secretary's bedroom, a school room, a sewing room, a trunk room (storage for the guests), a suite for someone named Miss Whitfield, five guest bedrooms, two guest servant rooms, and associated bathrooms.
Fourth floor: servants' bedrooms, bathrooms, and two storage rooms. Note that male and female servants areas are completely separated, and also, there are a lot more female servants than male servants. This was common; there's an estimate that around the turn of the century, around 1/3 of all women in the US worked in domestic service at some point in their lives. There were a lot more female servants out there than male servants. Also, it was almost universal that a house with live-in servants would put them on the top floor, so they're the ones having to climb the most stairs every day.
Wayne Manor is probably around this size, and it would have probably been built in the same era, or maybe a couple of decades before, depending on when exactly you think the Waynes made their money. It may be larger, it may have different sorts of public rooms (a music room instead of or in addition to a drawing room, for example), it may be built with wings instead of a solid block, it may take up more land but have fewer stories, but this should give you a vague idea of what sorts of things you should be picturing.
Here's some considerations:
Scale. The rooms will be comfortably sized for the purposes they're intended for. Some rooms will be bigger than others (a ballroom has to have more space than a bedroom), but the size will be based on how many people are intended to use the space at any one time.
No open floor plans. Instead of big rooms with different stuff in different areas, there will be a lot of different rooms. Instead of a huge bedroom with a seating area, you have a separate sitting room, that sort of thing. (This is part of why the rooms are at a comfortable scale.)
Practicalities. Fully half of that mansion is taken up by the space needed to service it. It's designed to have a small army of people taking care of the house and the family, all of the cooking and the cleaning and maintenance and stuff, because that was all a lot more labor intensive before things like vacuum cleaners, laundry machines, and dishwashers. And those areas are completely separate from the rest of the house. By and large, they aren't even on the same floor as any place the family or their guests would go. Servants work below their employers, and live above them. What this means for the batcave is up to you.
Guest vs. Family space. Most large homes had dedicated guest areas. Sometimes it was by wing, in the Carnegie mansion it was by floor, I visited a mansion once that just had a big carved wooden wall separating the half of the floor that was for the family from the half of it that was for guests.
Bathrooms. The Carnegie mansion was built in 1902, indoor plumbing was a thing (for the wealthy) by then. But even a few decades before, it wasn't, people just used chamber pots and wash stands (a small table with a bowl and a pitcher of water) instead. The problem with trying to retrofit bathrooms into a mansion built before indoor plumbing is more than just "where do you put the pipes," it's also "what rooms do you carve up to be bathrooms." Do you take a bedroom and convert it into a bathroom, and just have one really awkwardly large one? Do you take a bedroom and convert it into two bathrooms, one for the bedroom on each side of it? Do you do something else? You don't want to damage the historical molding and gorgeous decorated ceilings and the like, so you don't want to gut and remodel everything, so you're left with basically repurposing rooms that exist.
Also, I choose to headcanon that there is a staff of cleaners who comes in at least once a week, and a staff of groundskeepers ditto, because there is absolutely no way that one person could feasibly take care of all that and cook and be Batman's logistics guy. Even if the guest area is usually closed up and the servants quarters are permanently mothballed, that's a lot.
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I can't recall the name of the city where Dick was a cop, but I headcanon it as either Yonkers or Jersey City. I think that Static Shock's city was probably analogous to White Plains.
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Yes, THIS! Part of historical fiction and fantasy that so few get right is the absolute ubiquity of the servants. I woould also think that for parties they bring in catering staff. There's probably a few bonded companies that they use, and a whole extra level of checking that Alfred does.
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