274, Norwich Road

This is a house located at 274 Norwich Road, designed in 1912 by Arnold B Mitchell for local builder Thomas Parkington. It was the winning design of the Daily Mail Ideal Villa competition of that year. The building features red brick with concrete decorative panels and plain tile roofs. It has a square plan, with the first and second floors set within steeply pitched roofs, creating a cruciform shape on the upper floor. The house is two storeys high with an attic.

Each facade includes a two-storey gable above the ground floor. There is a central square brick chimney stack with an oversailing cap and tall pots. The roadside elevation is symmetrical, featuring heavy rusticated clasping pilasters at the corners, topped by deeply oversailing and dentilled cornices at the eaves level of the ground floor.

The ground floor has two bays with five canted mullioned lights, originally with two sets of four panes, but now modified to have single upper hung openings in the central light. On the first floor, there are two pairs of two-light timber casements, each with large rectangular concrete aprons that have a geometric design of linked raised rectangles. The original design included aprons decorated with swags. These windows are framed by shallow pilaster-like brick architraves, with inner strips rising to frame a single attic window of the same design. The entrance is located at the center of the symmetrical left-hand return, which also has single windows on the first and second floors. This house is considered to be the only remaining example of the Daily Mail's competition design.