The English architect Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912) is noted for his domestic work, in which he was one of the most gifted designers in the Queen Anne, or "Shavian," style.

Richard Norman Shaw was born in Edinburgh on May 7, 1831. His architectural training began at 15 in the London office of William Burn, a domestic architect of some distinction. In 1854 Shaw won the Gold Medal of the Royal Academy, and its traveling scholarship permitted a journey that resulted in the publication of his Architectural Sketches from the Continent (1858), a folio of 100 lithographed vignettes of medieval ecclesiastical and domestic architecture in France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.

In 1858 Shaw succeeded Philip Webb as chief assistant to George Edmund Street, the leading Victorian Gothic church architect. In 1862 Shaw set up his own practice in London in loose partnership (until 1868) with William Eden Nesfield, to whom his early work owes much.

Shaw began as...