Hawthorns

Hawthorns is a detached villa built around 1855, located on Sir Harry's Road in Edgbaston. This two-story, three-bay structure is set back behind a carriage sweep and features a recessed screen wall that connects to a wing with a coach house on the northwest side. The villa showcases richly detailed Italianate architecture, including a plinth, vermiculated quoins, and a ground floor that is channelled up to the first-floor sill course.

The building is adorned with an ornately modeled bed string featuring anthemion and acanthus motifs, positioned below flat eaves supported by moulded modillion brackets that return across the gable ends. The slate roof has marked coupled chimney stacks, with the upper parts of the shafts bridged and corniced, topped with ornamental pots.

On the ground floor, the windows and porch are framed by square porches with acanthus-decorated capitals in a Graeco-Egyptian style, all featuring entablatures that project forward from the sill course. The main entrance door consists of ten molded panels set within an architrave, which is flanked by consoles supporting a cornice above.

The first-floor windows are enhanced by flanking strips with floral pendants and capped by consoles, with a miniature corbel table above the window heads. Each window is set with casement lights featuring large diamond panes, and above the entablatures of the ground floor windows and porch are cast iron scrolled panels of balustrading with moulded capping, carried over the flanking stucco dies. The screen wall has a parapet coping that sweeps up to the hipped slate roof of the coach house. This villa is a particularly ornate and well-preserved example of a Calthorpe Estate Villa.