The Old Bridge House

The Old Bridge House is a house dating back to the 17th century, with alterations made in the 18th and 20th centuries. It is timber-framed and rendered, with a roof of handmade red plain tiles. The house originally comprised two bays facing northeast, with a stack at the rear of each bay. A two-bay wing extends to the rear of the right-hand bay, and a single-storey extension was added in the 20th century. A 17th-century stair tower sits at the rear of the left-hand bay.

The main façade is two storeys and has attic space. A two-storey splayed bay, dating from the 18th century, features sash windows with 12-16-12 lights on the ground floor, 12-12-12 lights on the first floor, and 20th-century casements on both floors. The attic floor has casements designed to resemble 18th-century round-headed sashes, along with 20th-century gabled features. A lead rainwater head is decorated with embossed foliage. A 20th-century door with a gabled canopy on brackets is set into the right return.

Inside, the house features chamfered axial beams with lamb's tongue stops. The right-hand bay has plain joists of vertical section, while the left-hand bay’s joists are mainly horizontal. The right-hand ground-floor hearth has been altered, with the original mantel beam raised over a 20th-century brick arch. The left-hand ground-floor hearth has been completely rebricked, retaining the original chamfered mantel beam with lamb's tongue stops. An 18th-century two-panel pine door is located behind the left-hand bay, and a 17th-/18th-century plain battened door is behind the right-hand bay. The right-hand front room on the first floor has a dado of 18th-century pine panelling. The left-hand front room is characterised by an early 19th-century entrance lobby with a semi-elliptical arch and fluted pilasters. The stair tower contains a late 17th-century open well staircase, featuring moulded closed strings, wide moulded handrails, and turned balusters, which is considered to be of high quality and requires special care. An early 19th-century cast iron ducknest grate is present in an upper room of the rear wing. The roof of the main range is constructed with clasped purlins and includes some re-used smoke-blackened rafters from a medieval roof. A photograph from approximately 1865, when the building was known as The Swan Inn, depicts a plastered parapet at the front and side, a hipped roof, and an external stack on the right return, as reproduced in Kelvedon and its Antiquities (1974).