The Homestead

The Homestead, Woodbourne Road, Edgbaston

Built in 1897 and designed by the architectural practice of J J Bateman and his son C E Bateman, The Homestead is an important early Birmingham Arts and Crafts house. At this date the practice was predominantly led by the son, and the house demonstrates their skill in creating a good-sized dwelling with a characteristically unpretentious free vernacular revival character.

The house is concealed from the road and approached by a serpentine drive through large terraced gardens which retain much of their original layout and planting. It is an L-plan double pile house of three bays, arranged with the main front facing south towards the garden and the entrance positioned to the west side of the rear wing. The building is principally of two storeys with a two-storey and attic shallow gabled break at the west end of the garden front. The elevations are rendered in roughcast, their asymmetry deliberately expressive of the identity of the rooms behind.

Extending west from the end of the rear wing, and informally defining an entrance court, is a lower painted brick coach house and service range executed in a more specifically 18th-century vernacular idiom. Throughout, the roofs are of stone slate, hipped over the coach house range which has flat roof dormers. The eaves are overhanging; the gabled break to the garden has stone coping swept out over small flush kneelers. External chimney stacks are a distinctive feature: one is adjacent to the break facing the garden, and one stands at each gable end serving ingle-nooks where they are corbelled out. These are tall, slightly battered red brick shafts with thin ashlar caps.

The fenestration is principally horizontal with typical high-quality Birmingham metal leaded casements set just under the eaves on the first floor. Functional vaults on the garden terrace front are expressive of the interiors. A wood mullioned transomed first floor window in the gabled break lights a room with a rectangular bay window below having a pent stone slate roof projecting each side and swept up to the sill of the first floor window between the break and external stack. A pent roof hall window is built out from the right-hand side of the external stack. Bands of windows pierce the plain wall to the right.

The entrance in the rear wing is emphasised by a low, organic arched stone doorway with a deep drip mould and splayed reveal. The arch is inscribed "East, West, Home's Best" and the door is recessed in a porch.

At the far end of the coach house range is a full height round arched carriageway through to a small rear stable yard. Inside the archway, the handling of limited turning space is ingenious: the right-hand wall opens by means of folding doors into the coach house proper, while the left-hand wall is canted inwards with a side door and plain light for access to the hayloft attic and coachman's flat to the right.

Internally, the house remains virtually as built. Original Arts and Crafts door furniture survives, as do most of the contemporary electric light fittings. The colour scheme throughout is broken white, with stained oak woodwork.

A modest entrance hall and passage leads to the service cross passage of the rear wing and right into the staircase hall of the main south range. The off-centre hall, expressed externally by the stack to the terrace, is flanked by the long dining room to the east and the drawing room, including the bay in the gabled break, to the west. The whole suite can be thrown into one space by means of simply panelled folding doors separating the two rooms from the hall. The latter contains a centrally placed staircase rising in one flight between flank walls to the first floor rear corridor. The off-centre fireplace opposite has a stone surround of simplified Tudor design, and including the hearth is treated with polychrome tiles of a Portuguese 17th or 18th-century inspired pattern.

The living room has plain walls but the full width of one end wall is treated as an ingle-nook, panelled with two square wood piers bearing a lintel. Two small lights flank the fireplace, which has a full height stone surround with a rosette-studded cavetto cornice, a slightly bowed shelf and an overmantel with a wreath-framed cartouche. The hearth has a studded brass frame and tent hood.

The drawing room ingle-nook is more simply treated with a cambered soffit, high dado and plain panelling above. A plain wood mantelpiece bears Tudor roses; the hearth is laid with blue-green tiles and the panelled overmantel incorporates a convex mirror. The ceiling is decorated with "pargetting" on the shallow projection of the joists.

The former billiard room lies behind the dining room and extends slightly further east to gain a south corner window. The fireplace beside it has a full height canted plaster overmantel with strips of pargetting similar to that of the drawing room ceiling. A plain ashlar mantelpiece with a deep concave shelf carries the stonework up three-quarters of the height of the overmantel as pilaster strips. The tile lining is the same as in the hall. Windows on the north wall are high set with window seats. A plain exposed joist ceiling covers the room. A large wrought and glazed scrolled iron five-branch billiard lamp remains in situ.

The Homestead is probably one of the most innovating of Bateman and Bateman's domestic Arts and Crafts designs and was noted in The Builder.