Lea Wood Hall, Entrance Gatepiers And Attached Boundary Wall

Lea Wood Hall, Entrance Gatepiers and Attached Boundary Wall

A small country house built between 1874 and 1877, designed by the architect W. Eden Nesfield. The building exemplifies the vernacular revival style with a composition that draws on a variety of regional influences, displaying free use of stonework, tile hanging, and timber frame detailing.

The plan is informal, organised around a small kitchen courtyard and an outer entrance courtyard. The composition achieves a balanced asymmetry through an irregular 'U' shape, with a dominant entrance range and a lesser service range projecting from a cross range that carries the garden elevation. The roofline is particularly distinctive, dominated by deep tiled roofs, hipped and half-hipped, with crested ridges and massive clustered decorative brick stacks, formerly topped with boldly corbelled caps.

The entrance elevation displays two bays across two storeys with attics. A broad double-jettied half-timbered gable rises from a stone ground floor with chamfered plinth. The jetty bressumer is carried on brackets supported by moulded timber corbel beams. The bressumer, collar and tie beams are moulded with carved crenellations, and the close studding infill panels are decorated with ornamental plasterwork. A seven-light first floor oriel features coved plasterwork to its base and avolo-moulded timber mullions with leaded lights. The gable apex contains a three-light window, with moulded barge-boards to the oversailing roof. A three-light chamfer-mullioned and transomed window occupies the ground floor, alongside a deeply splayed doorway in ashlar masonry. The doorway is topped by a chamfered pointed segmental arch of three stages beneath a hoodmould and features a planked door with cover strips. A recessed bay to the west includes a chamfered plinth, moulded string-course and a single casement window with glazing bars. Flanking side wallstacks rise in ashlar to above eaves level, continuing as brick clusters above.

The kitchen courtyard to the east is enclosed by a masonry wall with moulded plinth. A doorway in the courtyard wall features a moulded surround and Tudor arched head. The secondary range enclosing the east side of the courtyard features a deep tiled roof and casements of two, three and four lights beneath segmental arches. A doorway beneath a brick arch has a quoined surround and a six-panelled door.

The garden front comprises seven bays, with masonry at ground floor level and tile hanging above. Timber-mullioned and mullioned-and-transomed windows of two, three and four lights feature leaded glazing. A canted two-storey half-timbered bay at the west end contains ovolo-moulded mullioned and transomed windows with decorated infill plasterwork. A massive external masonry stack rises at the east end, topped by a decorative brick cluster stack above the eaves. An asymmetrical gable at the east end features casement windows, whilst the lower range to the centre carries coupled gabled dormers with decorative plasterwork to their apexes.

The interior retains substantial period details, including principal ground floor hearths, the main staircase with painted glass to the stair windows, and doors with period hardware.

North of the entrance elevation stands a pair of entrance gatepiers, each 2.3 metres high and square in plan, with projecting moulded bases beneath pyramidal caps. Flanking walls feature set-offs to their inner sides and ridged copings. Lower square piers mark the garden entrance, with coping mould running into pyramidal caps.