A pavilion is a light, usually freestanding building set within a garden, park or estate, designed for pleasure, shelter or display rather than permanent habitation. The word can also describe a projecting section at the end or centre of a larger façade, marked out by its own roof or architectural treatment.
Garden pavilions were a central feature of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, where temples, rotundas, banqueting houses and summerhouses were placed to frame views and reward a walk around the grounds. Designers drew on classical, Gothic and Chinese sources, and the Chinoiserie and Indian tastes produced some of the most exotic examples, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton being the most famous. Later Victorian and Edwardian pavilions served cricket grounds, bandstands and seaside promenades, often in timber or cast iron. In the antiques trade the term covers architectural salvage from such buildings, including columns, cupolas, finials and ironwork, as well as smaller garden structures sold complete. Today reclaimed pavilions and their fittings are used to give a mature, historic character to a new garden, and condition of timber, stonework and roofing is the first thing to assess.
