Warren Park Warrenfield

Warren Park, Bengeo Street, Hertford

A small country house, subdivided into two dwellings, dating to 1880 or earlier with alterations and subdivision carried out in 1970. The building is constructed of red brick in Flemish bond with stucco dressings and Welsh slated roofs.

EXTERIOR

The main elevation is two storeys with three-storey turrets. The east elevation features gables with elaborate barge boards to left and right. The first floor has French windows with iron balconies and stucco architraves. Four mullion and transom windows are set in a recessed centre, two with gabled roofs above the eaves, their eaves supported on cut profiled brackets and decorated with elaborate barge boards. The ground floor displays projecting mullioned and transomed bay windows to left and right; the bay to the right partly runs across a single bay extension. An eight-bay loggia occupies the recessed centre, covered by a lean-to Welsh slated roof. The loggia has brick piers with foliated capitals and terracotta moulded Tudor arches featuring modelled foliated spandrels. The arches have twentieth-century glazed infill.

To the left is a two-bay by three-bay two-storey south wing with a castellated papered flat roof, stucco quoins, and a brick plat band at first-floor level. The first floor has two mullion and transom windows with stucco architrave surrounds. The ground floor has two six-panel doors, with the upper four panels glazed, both with stucco architraves and circular lunettes above.

The return south elevation displays three narrow transom windows on the first floor with stucco surrounds, and three twelve-pane sashes on the ground floor, recessed in stucco architrave surrounds.

The west elevation contains numerous gables with elaborate barge boards and a three-storey turret with a concave profile lead roll roof positioned left of centre. The former main entrance, located right of centre, has a broad gabled barge board with a smaller one set behind to the left. Below is a tall multi-light mullioned and transom window with a semicircular arched inner panel containing leaded lights and small square panels with painted and stained glass shields and roundels. A circa 1870 flat-roofed canopy and glazed screen sit on the ground floor. The library wing is set back to the right. The gables are decorated with elaborate fretted and pierced wooden barge boards, giving a chalet appearance. Part of this section is flat-roofed with stone coping and castellated parapet. Numerous red brick chimneys with oversailing brick caps are present, some with semicircular stone flue baffles in place of pots.

INTERIOR

Warren Park is an elaborate, eclectic late Victorian house. The interior incorporates the former library from The Chelsea house of the Bishops of Winchester near Oakley Street in London, which was demolished in 1828 and is reputedly designed by the architect William Kent (1684–1748). The nearly complete mid-eighteenth-century panelled room was brought to Hertford around 1880.

The principal room features painted panelled walls with a flush dado above a nineteenth-century moulded skirting. The dado rail has bead moulding and carved acanthus. Upper panels are recessed with egg-and-dart quadrant moulding. The cornice displays an egg-and-dart band, modillions and cyma recta moulding.

The fireplace has a purple marble inner surround with a raised quadrant eared architrave. The outer surround features a shell and acanthus band, scrolls with drops and acanthus leaves, and a pulvinated frieze with dart cornice shelf above. The chimneybreast incorporates an elaborate carved frame with eared and shouldered architraves, carved scrollwork above (featuring a cartouche displaying the episcopal arms) and below, and carved swags on each side. This frame contains a late nineteenth-century copy of a portrait of the Bishop of Winchester.

Window surrounds are panelled with heavy carved egg-and-dart architraves. Three six-panel doors have carved egg-and-dart quadrant surrounds, with the upper four panels of the two south (garden) doors glazed. The east internal door has an eared architrave with a carved acanthus band, a pulvinated frieze with carved oak leaves and cross bands, and a cornice and pediment above with egg-and-dart and acanthus mouldings. The south doors have architraves without ears, a front cornice head above the pulvinated frieze, and glazed lunettes in a recessed panel above. The ceiling is nineteenth-century plaster featuring a bold modelled oval band of fruit and cross-banded moulded spandrel panels.

The drawing room has a ribbed moulded plaster ceiling in Gothic style with pendants. The chimneypiece has a nineteenth-century red marble pilaster surround with white marble capitals and a central cartouche, a moulded cornice shelf, and a reset eighteenth-century upper mirror panel with architrave surround. Carved festoons, drops of fruit in the manner of Grinling Gibbons are displayed throughout. An elaborately carved double cyma recta cornice with a lower acanthus band completes the scheme.

The staircase, reputedly brought from Sanctuary House in Ireland, incorporates eighteenth-century open string hardwood flights with carved bracket treads, two iron twist columns on vases and one column on vase baluster to each tread with a moulded handrail, ramped to the first-floor landing, and nineteenth-century square tapered antae newels surmounted by carved lions sejant holding cartouches. The landing has nineteenth-century arcading with Tudor arches. A large mullion and transom window with leaded glass displays painted armorial symbols and crests of the Smith, Sawyer, Cozens and Clayton families. The walls are panelled in nineteenth-century oak.