Beales Corner

This is an early 17th-century house, located in Bewdley, Worcestershire, and altered in the 18th and 19th centuries. The house has a timber-frame structure with plaster infill panels, with the ground floor front wall rebuilt in painted brick. The roof is covered in clay plain tiles with gabled ends and a gabled front, featuring a pendant and remnants of a finial. A brick stack is located at the rear.

The house originally had a two-room plan, with a stack at the rear serving corner fireplaces in both the ground and first floor rooms. The exterior is two storeys and an attic, with a two-bay front displaying close-studding and a jettied first floor and attic. The first floor has five-light, ovolo-moulded mullion-transom windows with old casements; these windows retain leaded panes, some with early 17th-century lozenge-shaped panes. The broad attic gable is jettied out on round-ended joists, and features a four-light, ovolo-moulded window with casements. The ground floor, which was rebuilt in the 18th or 19th century using painted brick, has two three-light casements with glazing bars and a 20th-century panelled door situated to the left of the center.

The interior timber-frame remains largely intact, with exposed wall framing. There are chamfered axial beams without stops, along with unchamfered exposed joists. The right-hand (south) ground floor room has a corner fireplace built with brick, featuring a rounded back. The first floor chamber above has a smaller brick fireplace with a dressed stone lintel. On the south wall of this chamber are three painted plaster panels, continuing over the timber frame, with remnants of early 17th-century painted decoration on the frame of the opposite wall. These panels depict a rural scene featuring figures harvesting grapes, vines on a trellis, and animals including a jumping fox, a coiled snake, and birds. These paintings may depict scenes from Aesop’s Fables or the Bible, or portray grape harvesting. An 18th-century fielded six-panel door is present between two first floor rooms. The roof is a two-bay structure with a broad gable at the front, incorporating collar and tie-beam trusses with V-struts above the end collars; the central truss includes a higher collar with an integral door frame below. The roof also features chamfered tenoned purlins, straight wind-braces, a diagonal ridgepiece, and common-rafters, which are mostly intact.

This is a good example of a small, early 17th-century timber-framed town house, notable for its well-preserved interior and the presence of significant early wall paintings.