On January 24, 1710, six years after his father’s death, William Byrd wrote in his diary: “I had my father’s grave opened to see him but he was so wasted there was not anything to be distinguished. I ate fish for dinner.” The brief entry says a good deal about the wealthy Virginia planter and the builder of Westover, near Richmond, on the James River. Throughout his life William Byrd remained cold, formal, and obsessed with the way things looked.

In Byrd’s diaries, which he kept in secret code for more than thirty years (1709-41), his personality is surprisingly elusive. The diaries catalog the events in Byrd’s life from the extraordinary to the mundane, but they tell us little about what he thought and even less about what he felt. What finally does emerge from Byrd’s diaries is a portrait of a man with a love for display and ceremony and with an aversion to the expression of any emotion.

Byrd’s obsession with external appearances is useful as a metaphor for his age and as a key to understanding the architecture of Westover, one of the finest Georgian houses in America. In letters, in philosophy, in the arts, and in architecture, the eighteenth century was an age of reason triumphant over passion. The writers of the Enlightenment—John Locke, Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison—held the belief that nature was subject to laws and that people could understand these laws and benefit from them. From palaces to plays, in treatises and in teacups—in every aspect of life—order, balance, and control were most highly prized. And the greatest expression of these laws that derived from and governed nature was to be found in the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was to this idealized past that America’s ruling class looked for inspiration.

Named for the reigning monarchs of England, the Georgian architectural style in colonial America was more than the sum of pediments and pilasters, more than its innovations, such as sliding sash windows. It proclaimed a new conception of a world based on rational order and proportion, a world in which local passions and brute forces were subservient to universal reason and “proper” form.

Completed in 1735, Westover is typical of the hundred or so high-style Georgian houses that still stand in America and in which this Enlightenment philosophy can be traced. Classical details, meticulously copied from London pattern books, were not just applied decoration, like the icing on a cake (as they would be on numberless imitations), but were integral expressions of precise rules of harmony and proportion. The dimensions and placement of pediments, pilasters, cornices, water tables, and stringcourses (see glossary on page 113) were dictated by the rules of geometry and were themselves a part of the building’s larger aesthetic unity. Given this stylistic imperative, the architecture of Westover was based on a code no less elaborate than the code in which Byrd composed his