Heath House

Heath House is a large country house on the west side of Heath Common at Warmfield-cum-Heath. Originally a mid-17th-century building, it was substantially remodelled and given a new front around 1744 by the architect James Paine for the Hopkinson family.

The main front is built in ashlar in the Palladian Villa style, with the rear constructed of hammer-dressed stone. The roof is covered with Welsh blue slate and lead. The building is 2½ storeys with cellars beneath.

The symmetrical facade comprises five bays. The basement is rusticated with a central semicircular-arched doorway; bays either side have rectangular flat-arched windows. The first bay on the left was altered in the mid-19th century with an inserted two-light bay window. Niches are set below the corner pilasters. The principal floor features a central window with a segmental pediment on consoles. Windows in bays two and four have plain heads with matching windows above to the attic storey. Those in bays one and five have shouldered architraves, consoles and triangular pediments, with a window with architrave above each. The three central bays are carried on three-quarter-attached giant Ionic columns and quarter pilasters, which support a pediment. The wider flanking bays terminate with coupled pilasters. An entablature, cornice and blocking course run across the front, which is topped by a hipped roof.

The rear elevation preserves the earlier house: a three-cell hall with projecting crosswings. The windows have been altered to sashes. Two coped gables remain, the right-hand one featuring a large external stack. The returns of the 18th-century house match the front in style, though simplified. The left-hand return belongs to the earlier house and has three bays of sash windows with plain-stone surrounds and an external lateral stack between the second and third bays. Another lateral stack serves the right-hand return. Two further concealed stacks exist to the north and south of the stairwell.

The interior retains significant 19th-century decoration on the ground floor. The central door opens into a square entrance hall with a stilted-arched central doorway flanked by doorways with architraves and dentil cornice. Behind this is a top-lit stair-hall containing a stone cantilevered open-well stair with 19th-century decorative cast-iron balusters. A doorway leads left to a dog-leg service stair; one to the right opens into a large room with a segmental-arched recess containing a doorway with architrave, flanked by niches, and a richly-moulded cornice.

The original rear house contained service rooms, three of which retain stop-chamfered beamed ceilings. The first floor of the 18th-century house comprises principal apartments: lofty, well-proportioned rooms with fluted architraves, six-panel doors, dado-rails, skirtings, panelled window surrounds and casement-moulded cornices. Rear rooms have panelled dados. The second floor is accessed only by the service stair and contains low-ceilinged bedrooms with original 18th-century fittings: moulded dados, panelled doors, shutters, window seats and chimneypieces enriched with later Georgian papier-mâché decoration.

Heath House holds considerable historical and architectural significance. Peter Leach has identified it as James Paine's first fully independent commission on record. Marcus Binney considers it Paine's second individual work after Serlby Hall in Nottinghamshire (circa 1740), and notes its importance as the successful prototype facade that Paine repeated shortly afterwards at Belford Hall and the south front of Gosforth Park in Northumberland. The house exemplifies the flowering of 18th-century quality in the village, representing both the extension and improvement of an older building and the expert use of locally quarried raised quality stone. Heath House appears in the first volume of Paine's own published work: Plans, Elevations and Sections of Noblemen and Gentlemen's Houses (1761, plates LXI and LXII).