Sun Court

Sun Court is a hall house of mid-15th-century date, floored in the mid-16th century and extended to the rear in the early 16th century. It was restored between 1927 and 1929 by Sydney Schofield. The building is constructed of plastered and colourwashed timber frame with plaintile and slate roofs.

The building follows a traditional hall house plan with a central hall, screens passage, service cross wing to the north, and parlour cross wing to the south.

The east front is of two storeys with a four-window range. Gabled cross wings project to the north and south, with upper floors carried on corbelled jetties. The south wing's ground floor is fitted with half-glazed twentieth-century garage doors. A canted bay window to the first floor contains a seventeenth-century sunk quadrant-moulded cross casement. The north gable has a seventeenth-century two-light cross casement to the ground floor and a three-light mullioned window to the first floor. The hall bays feature a segmental timber door containing a wicket gate to the right and a sixteenth-century bay window to the left under a sloping roof with roll-moulded mullioned lights. Two three-light cross casements light the first floor. A ridge stack sits right of centre.

The rear elevation displays a wide segmental opening with a wicket. Twin two-light mullioned windows and one tripartite sash light the ground floor of the service wing, with a three-light eighteenth-century casement above. Pargeting panels the entrance doorway. An early-nineteenth-century two-storey extension to the north is fitted with 6/6 and 8/8 unhorned sashes.

The early-sixteenth-century two-storey rear wing features two bay windows on moulded brick plinths. The left bay window has a six-light mullioned and transomed casement with a central king mullion; the right bay window is similar but with five lights and without a king mullion. All mullions are roll and hollow moulded. The left bay window has external steps descending to a cellar. The right bay is flanked by two two-light mullioned windows under a coved first-floor jetty. A frieze of six mullioned windows sits beneath the jetty between the bay windows, above a four-centred doorway with carved spandrels containing the arms of the de Vere family (star) and Bouchier family (knot). A moulded bressumer runs to the first floor. Herringbone brick nogging fills the space between upper studs. The left bay window has an eight-light mullioned and transomed casement with king mullion and a single-light west return casement. A six-light frieze window sits under the eaves to the right, with a six-light mullioned and transomed window to the far right. The left gable is jettied to the attic with a moulded bressumer. A ridge stack crowns the roof of the projecting gable end of the solar wing.

The rear elevation comprises four bays of timber framing defined by principal studs with herringbone brick nogging between secondary studs. A continuous frieze of leaded casements containing twenty-two lights runs across the ground floor, with a similar frieze to the first floor.

Internally, a screens passage links the front and rear doorways, with one cusped ogee-headed service doorway to the north. An internal partition between service rooms has been removed. The former open hall retains a rebuilt mid-sixteenth-century fireplace under a hollow-chamfered bressumer. Cruciform sixteenth-century keel- and wave-moulded bridging beams span the hall. A blocked former doorway to the solar staircase sits in the south-west corner, the staircase itself having been removed. The parlour to the south has a chamfered bridging beam on solid arched braces and plain ceiling joists, with an early-sixteenth-century fireplace in the west wall. A sixteenth-century passage created to the west of the former hall contains two hollow-chamfered pointed arches cut from the former arch-braced hall roof. An early-nineteenth-century stick-baluster staircase sits at the south end.

The first floor contains a solar to the south with visible corner studs and wall plates. One plain room over the hall has no exposed timbers. A second room over the hall displays heavy-scantling studwork and eighteenth-century timberwork to the front where the roof has been raised; one joist remains smoke-blackened. The roof was replaced in the mid-eighteenth century with principals, trenched collars, and no purlins; many repairs are evident.

The rear wing divides each storey into one large and one small room. The ground-floor main room has a rebuilt fireplace in the east wall under a roll-moulded bressumer with brattishing and ribbon foliage in the spandrel. Multiple roll-moulded bridging beams and spine beam divide the ceiling into six panels, with secondary joists also bearing multiple roll mouldings. The second room contains a seventeenth-century eight-panelled door, with a nineteenth-century brick fireplace under a fragment of a longer bressumer in the west wall, and an external doorway to the right. A wave-moulded bridging beam and joists are visible. The first floor features jowled principal studs, a plain chamfered bridging beam, and a chamfered fireplace bressumer, with sixteenth-century window catches.