33, Edgbaston Park Road

33 Edgbaston Park Road

A nursery school, formerly a house, dating from the 16th or 17th century with extensive 19th-century additions and alterations. The building has rendered and painted walling with painted stone dressings and a plain-tiled roof. It is of two storeys with attic and has an irregular plan.

The oldest 17th-century portion consists of a large ground-floor room with a similar room immediately above it in the southern corner of the building. A large chimneybreast projects from its south-western flank, and a 19th-century canted bay has been added to its south-eastern face. The show fronts face south-east and south-west. Extending to the north-west is a lower L-shaped service wing.

Exterior

The building is rendered with painted stone dressings, quoins, and a plain-tiled roof. Much of the earlier fabric is also clothed in this 19th-century covering. The south-east front features a projecting gabled wing to the left, which is the oldest part of the house. This has a later two-storey canted bay window with hipped roof, stone quoins to the corners, and ashlar coping to the gable. In the re-entrant angle between this earlier wing and the later body of the house is a smaller gabled porch wing with a cross window to the ground floor, which may once have been a doorway. Above this is a relieving arch with hood mould, and at first-floor level is a three-light casement with arched heads to the lights. Recessed to the left is the later 19th-century dining-room wing, which has a canted bay window to the ground and first floors and a gabled dormer window of three lights to the attic.

The south-west flank has a prominent chimney stack beside the 16th or 17th-century wing, appearing to be of the same early date. It has numerous offsets and supports two diamond-shaped flues. To the left is the gable end of the late-19th-century dining-room wing, which also has a prominent stack in emulation of the early fabric, likewise supporting two diamond-shaped flues.

The north-east front has a gabled wing at the left with a square bay window of two storeys, and at the right is the lower service wing.

Interior

The 16th or 17th-century part of the house has a panelled ceiling to the ground-floor room with large, richly-moulded beams running axially and cross-axially to form four compartments, which are in turn divided by smaller beams running in two directions. There is a chamfered wall post to the centre of the north-eastern wall, and opposite this is the inglenook fireplace. This has been remodelled in the 19th century with a fire surround and bressumer shelf, which nonetheless appear to indicate the underlying form of the 17th-century fireplace. Immediately above is a further 17th-century room with a pair of sizeable beams crossing at the centre, bearing ovolo mouldings to their edges.

The entrance hall has a floor of encaustic tiles and a staircase rising from it with oak newel posts and painted, chamfered balusters.

The late-19th-century dining room has a panelled inglenook with a basket-arched bressumer and decoratively-leaded windows to either side of the fireplace, above which is a recessed panel of needlework. Elsewhere at ground and first-floor levels are stone fireplaces of mid-19th-century date, painted and bearing Gothic ornament of quatrefoils to the spandrels or clusters of colonettes to either side of the hearth.

History

The building dates in part from the 16th or 17th century. Internal photographs taken during restoration in the 1980s show close-studded timber framing to the walls at ground-floor level in the older part of the interior and substantial timbers of a similar age to the roof. The property is clearly marked on a map of the Calthorpe Estate from October 1839, which shows the central block including the south wing with a bay window to its south-east front and deep chimney breast to its south-west face. Later additions occurred in the mid-19th century, at which time the house was clothed with Gothic Revival ornament to both its exterior and interior, and at the end of the 19th century or start of the 20th century when the dining-room wing was added to the south-west. The house was used as a residence until the 20th century and now operates as a nursery school.