The Garden Cottage approximately 130 metres south west of Balls Park Mansion

The Garden Cottage, located approximately 130 metres southwest of Balls Park Mansion, is a house, now used as student accommodation, dating back to the 18th century, with alterations and extensions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is constructed primarily of red brick in English and Flemish bond, with a yellow brick porch on the south side. The roofs are tiled, featuring wave-scalloped barge boards on the east and west sides, a moulded oak barge board on the north wing, and yellow brick chimneys on the ridge, one with four octagonal brick shafts topped with tall, tapered orange pots, and another with a lower red brick chimney featuring a corbelled cap, an oversailing course, and two tapered pots. A third chimney is located on the north wing.

The building has two storeys. The original core is a three-bay cottage with 18th-century brickwork and a steeply pitched roof, featuring two small casement windows on the first floor and mullion and transom casements on the ground floor. A projecting gable porch from the early 20th century is centrally located on the front. To the east is a single-storey projection, reworked in a cottage ornée style in the early to mid-19th century. This features a gabled loggia on the east side with four oak columns and an arcade with a fretted fascia. A plastered spandrel sits above two recessed ground floor windows, each containing a two-light casement with lattice glazing and triangular Gothic heads.

A north wing, added in the early 20th century, is gabled and displays exposed oak studwork on the first floor and gable, an embattled tie beam, herringbone brick infill, an oak fascia to the bressumer, and a jettied overhang over the brick ground floor. It has a two-light wood casement with divided glazing, a moulded architrave surround, and a moulded sill on the first floor, and a Yorkshire sash window on the ground floor. The first floor of the west elevation has two mullion and transom windows with four-light square opening casements and lattice glazing, while the ground floor has a similar three-light window to the right and a 20th-century projecting flat-roofed bay to the left.

The interior has not been inspected.

The building's initial purpose appears to have been utilitarian, but it was altered and partly disguised as an architectural feature in the early to mid-19th century, and again in the early 20th century, coinciding with the construction of a nearby sunken garden.