Fanshaws

Fanshaws is a country house, now offices, built between 1883 and 1885 for Henry William Demaine Saunders. A service wing was heightened in 1912. The house was leased to the Barclay family from 1909 to 1963 and subsequently became the headquarters of the Institute of the Motor Industry. It is constructed of red brick with red sandstone dressings and windows, featuring moulded brick cornices. The roof is of steep red tiles with parapets.

The house is a compact, two-storey and attic, square mansion in Jacobean style, facing south and accessed from the north. It is linked to a rectangular, double-pile service wing attached at the northeast, projecting northward. The house is planned around a large, central hall, lit by a bay window on the east, with a smoking room to the northwest, a drawing room to the southwest, and a dining room to the southeast. A library is situated on the south side, between the drawing room and the dining room. Each of these rooms, with the exception of the library, contains two rectangular bay windows.

The north front is asymmetrical, with an entrance accessed via steps leading to a long, narrow projecting porch with ball finials to the swept parapet and a cantilevered classical entablature acting as a bracketed hood. A two-storey rectangular bay window is located to the right, featuring leaded glazing in ovolo-moulded, mullioned and transomed stone windows. A shaped gable rises above the parapet over this bay and over a large, canted oriel window, which illuminates the staircase to the left. A moulded plinth and deep cornices are present at first-floor and eaves level, with moulded capping to the parapet.

The symmetrical west elevation has two rectangular gabled bays, with a single-storey canted bay lighting the hall between them. A roundel in one gable displays the date ‘1884’. The south front is nearly symmetrical, with projecting two-storey gabled bays at each end, but features an arched stone doorway with a fanlight leading to the drawing room on the left and a mullioned and transomed window lighting the library on the right. The facade is enriched with egg-and-dart brick string courses at two levels.

The interior is in a Jacobean style, with three-quarter oak panelling in the hall, and an elaborate Ionic chimneypiece with a strapwork centrepiece to the overmantle, accompanied by a dentilled cornice and strapwork ceiling. There is an elaborate cut-string stair enclosed within an arched space from one corner of the hall. The drawing room contains C18-style panelling with bolection mouldings. The library is half-panelled, featuring an arcaded overmantle, linen-fold panels, and a Jacobean fan-like central motif. De Morgan-style polychrome tiles flank the grate. The dining room has a low panelled dado and an egg-and-dart cornice, while the chimneypiece houses a gadrooned shelf with reused Jacobean grotesque terms, two on either side. The service wing is accessed via four steps down through a door at the northeast and includes an arcaded upper stair hall.