The David Parr House

This small terraced house was built in the mid-1870s by George Cooper and lived in and decorated by the artisan painter David Parr from 1886 until his death in 1927. The house stands on the east side of Gwydir Street and is built of brown brick laid in Flemish bond with lime mortar pointing, brick dressings, and a slate roof.

Plan and Layout

The house has a narrow rectangular plan with a hallway leading to two reception rooms and a kitchen in a rear projection, followed by a scullery and WC in a lean-to extension. On the first floor are two bedrooms at the front and one at the rear. The bathroom above the kitchen was converted from a bedroom.

Exterior

The two-storey, two-bay house has a pitched roof and a wide chimney stack carrying eight clay pots positioned over the ridge on the right-hand side. The original guttering is embellished with lions' heads. The paint scheme, redone during conservation work, is based on colours Parr recorded in 1914. The white-painted front door in the left-hand bay has four panels, the upper two glazed, and a lunette overlight. The door sits under a round stone arch with a prominent keystone and is decorated on its inner edge with dogtooth ornament. The brick jambs either side are painted bright red. To the right, and in the two first-floor bays, are two-over-two-pane horned sash windows, reconditioned and painted mustard yellow with red jambs. The upper edges are decorated with dogtooth whilst the ogee lintels are painted stone colour.

The colour scheme on the rear elevation recreates that from the mid-20th century. The lower half of the walls is painted white and the window frames are cream with Brunswick green. The first bay has two-over-two-pane horned sash windows on both floors under segmental gauged brick arches. The two-storey projection housing the kitchen has a four-panel door on the left return and a window on each floor to the right. A single-storey lean-to against the rear of the projection, built by Parr as the scullery and WC, has a slate-clad roof. It is lit at the front by a window with leaded lights and on the left return by a window with opaque glass bricks, probably inserted around the mid-20th century.

Interior

The decorative schemes and built-in furniture carried out by Parr remain largely intact, as does much of the original joinery, fixtures and fittings. These include the four-panel doors, window furniture, bedroom fireplaces, cornices and skirting boards, along with items such as the coat hooks in the hallway.

Decorative Technique

The wall and ceiling patterns painted by Parr are adaptations of the schemes he executed professionally for F R Leach, which in turn were based on a revival initiated by Bodley and his circle of the medieval technique of decorating walls in imitation of textile patterns. In his notebook, Parr often refers to 'ornament' and 'diaper' (a repeating geometrical or floral pattern) to describe the patterns he painted. He used a technique called 'pouncing' (in which F R Leach specialised), a sort of tracing technique using semi-transparent paper pricked with holes that are dabbed with powder to transfer designs to walls, which was then followed with careful freehand painting.

Hallway

The lunette above the door, likely designed by F R Leach, contains a roundel with a naturalistic depiction of a singing bird in a wood, surrounded by leaded lights painted in a stylised foliage pattern. The lower two-thirds of the walls are painted on canvas in a pattern of curving stalks and blossoming motifs using deep russet and gold tones, referencing the designs of Pugin and Morris & Co. On the left wall, immediately inside the front door, is a section of Walton Lincrusta in the form of linenfold panelling, most likely an off-cut from one of Parr's jobs. As part of the conservation project, one of the panels was reproduced as the original had cracked. Further along this wall, Parr incorporated his own looped intertwined initials in the wall pattern. Above the dado, the original scheme has been covered in magnolia emulsion but where this has been removed it reveals a freer-form foliage design which recalls Morris's 'Willow' pattern. The swirling pattern on the ceiling, probably given to Parr at work, is an early example of Anaglypta, a lighter, more flexible version of Lincrusta, developed in 1887. The original linoleum floor covering contained asbestos and has been replaced.

Drawing Room

The drawing room is the pièce de résistance, containing an all-over pattern in a variety of scales and designs, with predominant tones of dark green and yellows, from orange to gold, which combine in sumptuous intensity. The walls beneath the dado have a very large-scale leaf design, whilst above a more intricate pattern (again large-scale but less so) of intertwining stylised flora and foliage is threaded by several inscriptions running around the room in scrolls painted to suggest a three-dimensional form. This principal pattern bears close comparison with Morris & Co.'s design for the window embrasures in Old Swan House in Chelsea which F R Leach had executed. The scroll to the left of the window reads: 'If you do anything, do it well.' Beginning from the right of the window and continuing along the top of the side and back walls, is a popular verse thought to be taken from Sunderland lusterware: 'Swiftly see each moment flies see and learn be timely wise, every moment shortens day every pulse beats life away thus our heaving breath wafts us on to certain death. Seize the moments as they fly, know to live and learn to die.' This is followed by a quote from the 17th-century Anglican priest and poet George Herbert: 'He who knows nothing doubts nothing.' The side wall to the left of the door features an inscription from Shakespeare's As You Like It: 'Tongues in trees, books in running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything.' The final inscription on the lower portion of the back wall features a line from a popular Victorian hymn 'There's a wideness in God's mercy': 'Now the Love of God is broader than the measure of man's mind and the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind.' Two small areas of decoration to the left and right of the window have been repainted after being lost to damp damage. The large-scale foliate design on the ceiling in green, yellow and gold with a central orange flower was inspired by another Morris & Co. design used for the ceiling in the Ambassador's Room at St James's Palace. The inner face of the door was grained by Parr to look like oak and the moulding of the panels painted in Abyssinian gold leaf. Parr applied Anaglypta flowers and Abyssinian gold leaf to the simple wooden fireplace surround. The tiled inset was put in around the mid-20th century, and the wallpaper on the chimney breast is not original to Parr's era.

Dining Room

The inspiration for the painted scheme in the dining room is not known but it is similar to the medieval or Renaissance silks that inspired Bodley. The pattern above the dado consists of vertical scrolls intertwined with large leaves in bright green and red on a white background. Parr records in his notebook the colours used for the frieze (taken from a Morris & Co. design): 'the yellow of Stalk is ochre with a touch of mineral green. The light Red is Indian red thinning. The blue ground is Turquoise & permanent White with a touch of Prussian…'. Below, the dado is hand-grained wood on the back window wall but grained plaster on the other walls. The original wooden fireplace surround survives but the tiled inset dates to the mid-20th century and the wallpaper above it to the 1960s. Parr built a fitted bureau into the alcove on the right of the chimneypiece and a full-height cupboard in the alcove to the left. The original curtain pole remains and the linoleum dates to the 1920s.

Kitchen

In the kitchen, Parr painted the chimney breast in the 1920s in a delicate design of blue flowers with willow-type leaves. It is not known if he put in the cupboards flanking the chimney breast but he did paint them red on the inside and blue on the outside, although they have since been painted in a cream colour. The stained glass in a swirling yellow foliate design, fitted into the lower half of the sash window, is in the style of F R Leach. The red quarry-tiled floor is original and the coal-fired oven is thought to have been built into the wall in the 1920s. Parr brought the outside WC into the lean-to in the 1890s and it retains its original lavatory with square wooden seat.

Staircase and Landing

The straight flight of stairs has been regrained in accordance with the work Parr recorded in his notebook: the stairs to look like oak and the handrail and banister like mahogany. The decorative wall pattern from the hallway is continued up the stairs and along the dado on the landing.

Back Bedroom

The painted decoration in the back bedroom, directly above the dining room, is nearly identical to that used in the dining room. The frieze below the dado is made of Anaglypta. Parr created the shallow relief panels on the ceiling by using strips of felt decorated with Anaglypta flowers at the intersections. The small round-arch cast-iron grate is set within a plain wooden surround embellished by Parr along the frieze with four medieval moulding profiles in the form of stylised foliage and flowers. The cupboard and washstand flanking the fireplace were made elsewhere but installed by Parr. The linoleum was laid in the Edwardian era.

Front Bedrooms

The two bedrooms and lobby at the front of the house were created out of one larger bedroom by Parr. They retain their original linoleum and wallpaper from around the 1940s, and the larger room has a small 19th-century fireplace with a round-arch insert. Parr added the Anaglypta swags around the frieze of the lobby but he died before he could finish decorating the two bedrooms. The smaller one has a hand-painted inscription in large letters along the top of the wall reading: 'May I always be ready when my Saviour calleth me. May I in sight of heaven rejoice, when I hear my Saviour's voice.'

Subsidiary Features

The brick coal bunker, built against the rear lean-to by Parr, originally had a slate-clad roof but this has since been replaced with corrugated iron.

The simple iron railings along the south and east sides of the garden are original and were made by a firm in East Road. The railings at the front of the house were removed during the Second World War and have been replaced by a low brick wall.