Avenue Farm

AVENUE FARM, COMBERBACH

Avenue Farm is a farmhouse built around 1845 with a service wing added around 1865. It was constructed for William Eaton, a gentleman and landowner who died in 1857, as part of his agricultural estate. The building exemplifies the mid-19th century fashion for estate improvement and architectural display in the English countryside.

The house is built in red brick laid in English Garden Wall bond and Flemish Bond patterns, with painted dressings, oversailing eaves, and decorative barge boards. The roof is slate, with ridge and gable wall stacks. The design is in the Tudor Gothic style.

The plan is linear, with the house and attached service range aligned to enclose one side of a small yard. The symmetrical front elevation has two storeys and three bays in Flemish Bond. A central doorway is set within an open porch with timber columns. The door is four-panelled with a rectangular overlight, set between moulded pilasters with cusped heads to the panel mouldings. On either side of the doorway are stacked window openings below painted hoodmoulds, with coupled 4 over 4 pane sash frames. The upper sashes have intersecting glazing bars forming Gothic-style arches. Three first-floor windows are similarly detailed. Two chimney stacks sit on the ridge line of each gable end.

The eastern gable end is exposed, with decorative fretwork bargeboards and a finial. It has six narrow windows, the central ground-floor and upper-floor windows being blind openings, while the others have coupled 2 over 2 pane sashes in the matching style of the front elevation. The rear elevation has a central doorway with a 2-light sash window above, a wide 2-light stair window with 6 over 4 coupled sashes, and a blind window opening to the left of the doorway. All windows display hoodmoulds in the style of the southern and eastern elevations. An advanced lean-to at the right-hand end of the rear elevation forms part of a more simply-detailed two-bay attached service range. The attached west service wing has two large flat-arched casement windows on the ground floor of its southern elevation, with a doorway to the western end, and two slightly smaller flat-arched windows on the first floor. The brickwork is a mixture of Flemish Bond and English Garden Wall Bond, with chimney stacks at the centre and western end.

The interior shows the original plan largely unaltered, although two doorways leading off the main hall have been blocked up. Access to the two rooms flanking this space is retained from the stair hall. The lounge at the far eastern end of the house has been opened up to incorporate the former pantry at the rear. Original fireplaces have been removed from the ground floor, but marble and cast-iron fireplaces are retained on the first floor. Fielded panelled doors are set within moulded architraves, with dado panelling and moulded reveals to windows and archways. Deep moulded cornicing runs throughout the building, with decorated reliefs to the main hall and first-floor landing ceilings. The main staircase is a straight flight with stick balusters, a panelled under-stair screen, and a decorative "wave" design to the cut string.

Avenue Farmhouse appears to be one of a number of farm dwellings built for William Eaton's estate in Comberbach. The house was tenanted until 1918, when it was sold to the occupying tenants. The building has undergone minor 20th-century alterations and additions. It remains a well-preserved example of an estate farmhouse from around 1845, characteristic of the architectural ambition and improvement that shaped the English countryside during the mid-19th century.