Brand Lodge

Brand Lodge is an early 20th-century house, dated 1910 based on leadwork, designed by Ernest Newton for Julia Holland in an Arts and Crafts style. The house sits within the Colwall civil parish. It is constructed with roughcast walls and Westmorland slate roofs, featuring end stacks with diagonally set detached shafts.

The symmetrical garden front faces roughly west, with cross-wings projecting further west to the north and south. To the north of the north cross-wing is a north-south oriented service wing. The main front has five window bays, with metal casements and top-vents containing six to fifteen panes set in cames, incorporated into wooden surrounds. The projecting wings each have two-storied, five-sided polygonal bays, separated by polygonal lead panels ornamented with garlands of coloured oak, thistle, and shamrock, flanked by vertical running oak leaves at the corners of each polygon. Projecting gables are accented with decorative bargeboards and pendants.

A semi-circular, balustraded porch with four Ionic columns provides access to the central entrance, while an eastern front also features a central entrance beneath a two-story projecting porch with a broken curved pediment supported by paired cushion-shaped corbels and a fine beaded oak door.

Inside, a spine corridor runs along the front of the main range. An open-well oak staircase to the north of the entrance features faceted knobs to the newel tops, an elaborate grid pattern between the handrails and string, and an original light fitting above the well. A room to the south of the entrance has a fireplace with depictions of the zodiac on the overmantel. The southwest projecting room has a tiled, marbled, mirrored fireplace, and all other fireplaces in the principal rooms remain complete. The bathroom retains original full-height tiling, a water closet, a cast iron bath on a marble slab, and a heated towel rail. The service wing includes a front-facing loggia, a combined maids' bathroom and laundry room with Columbian pine fittings, and a kitchen. A Chubb safe is also present. Notably, the skirting boards and window surrounds in the main ground floor rooms are of painted softwood, while the ceilings feature oak carvings. Semi-circular headed arches are found in the main corridor, exhibiting dying mouldings to the extradoses. The house contains four principal bedrooms, two dressing rooms, and three servants’ bedrooms.