;L” sections were designed back into the natural curve of the mountain. Jefferson hid a smokehouse, a kitchen, dairy rooms, an icehouse, stables, and harness rooms within these lower “L” shaped wings. The inhabitants of these wings were totally disguised from visitors because they were designed exactly like the house. Therefore these wings blended in with the main estate. This left the East and the West as the main entrances to his grand house. The west front of Monticello was the true entrance as his driveway looped directly in front of the portico. In his remodeling of Monticello, Jefferson created a look of a one-story house. In fact Jefferson went to great pains to accomplish this. He changed the staircases and hid them in small corners and shortened them to a mere two and a half feet wide. Jefferson believed that stairs were just a tool to be used to maneuver from floor to floor. In addition to hiding the stairs, Jefferson also enlarged the porticoes on the outside to create a one-story building. In reality Jefferson’s Monticello is a thirty two-room mansion but, appears to be much smaller at first glance. Monticello is also a haven for many of the early inventions and break-throughs in the design world. As you see Jefferson was also an inventor and always believed that there was some better way to do everything. In this respect Jefferson evoked his ideas on Monticello. Jefferson loved arches. He used the arches to divert the loads and to add elegance to the basic parts of the structure. These arches can be observed on the outside of the building all around the frame of the house. Jefferson used the arches to divert all the loads of the walls into columns. These columns were connected to the foundation and thus allowing the structure to not have great expansive foundations. By using the arches on the outside walls of the building, Jefferson was able to include a fully furnished basement with a wine cellar an...
