"One of the heroes of this [18th century gardening] movement was...Sir John Vanbrugh. Because he was self-taught, he was able to bring a fresh perspective to matters. He considered the setting of his houses as no architect had before, for instance. At Castle Howard, almost the first thing he did was rotate the house 90 degrees on its axis, so that it faced north-south rather than east-west....This made it impossible to provide the traditional long approach to the house, with glimpsed views across fields as a kind of visual foreplay, but had the compensating virtue that the house sat far more comfortably in the landscape and the occupants enjoyed an infinitely more satisfying outlook on the world beyond. This was a radical reversal of traditional orientation. Before this, houses weren't built to enjoy a view. They were the view." (258)

(Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.)