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The kitchen, or kitchen dependency, was separated from the house by a 40-foot underground passage that connected the basements of the house and the kitchen structure. The tunnel was reinforced with brick and unique in American domestic architecture of the period.
A separate kitchen offered the practical advantage of protecting the house from fire as well as odors and noise. By linking the kitchen structure to the house via an underground passage, Penn was also able to maintain the pure cubic dimensions of both the house and the kitchen structures while providing servants with a passage protected from the elements and isolated from houseguests and him.
Belowground passageways had been used in several eighteenth-century English villas, and their ancient predecessor, the cryptoporticus, had been a common feature within Roman villas. There is, however, no other apparent example of a tunnel for the dedicated use of servants. A 1745 plan of Alexander Pope’s famous garden and English villa in Twickenham, which may have inspired Penn’s design, shows the presence of an underground tunnel, however, Pope used the device to direct foot traffic from the Thames side of his house to the extensive gardens behind his villa. The passage solved the problem of cutting a road across the property by directing visitors beneath it.
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