The Dower House And Wall To Garden Attached

The Dower House is a country house formed from the joining of two 16th-century buildings, significantly altered in the 17th and 18th centuries and enlarged in the 1960s by Raymond Erith. It incorporates a 17th/18th century walled garden, now attached to the house. The building is constructed of red brick with blue headers, enclosing timber-framed sections, and has old red tile hipped roofs with moulded wooden eaves on the west side, and a high parapet with attic windows and gabled roofs behind on the east. It is two storeys and attics, with a single-storey link to the walled garden on the south.

The western front is in red brick, originally symmetrical with a three-window left-hand section and a central door within a lobby alongside a tall chimney with a cruciform shaft. It features sash windows with 6/6 panes and flat gauged arches. The doorcase has broad fluted Doric pilasters, a triglyph frieze, and a half-glazed panelled door. A two-bay 19th-century extension is set to the right, with a hipped dormer and casement windows.

The north end of the eastern part exhibits 17th-century detailing, including an ovolo-moulded floorband, chamfered plinth, no eaves cornice, a central hipped dormer with cornice, a flush box sash window on the first floor, and a blocked window below. The east front, five windows wide, is in darker red brick and designed in a churchwarden’s Gothic style with stucco quoins, a moulded parapet coping, surrounds to three oval attic windows, and classical moulded surrounds to a central double-glazed door and flanking narrow windows. The windows have delicate panelled surrounds, lion-mask corner blocks, and are grouped 2-1-2, each with brick labels. The central doors have a stucco entablature, and the glazed panels have ogee glazing bars. Side windows have pointed heads to the upper lights. A large external chimney with offsets is on the north end and attic windows have radial glazing bars.

Inside, the interior has been extensively remodelled, but retains a stop-chamfered beam in the passage to the library and early 18th-century panelling on the ground floor of the north-western part. The walled garden is enclosed by a 3-metre-high red brick wall with buttresses, and a pedimented doorway leads into the house; urns sit on the corner piers. Formerly known as Knights Hill.