Green Place

Green Place is a house built in 1906-07 for Ellen Mary Stratford Hill to the designs of the architect MH Baillie Scott. It was extended to the west in 1913, also by Baillie Scott, and has undergone minor alterations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The original building is a single-storey U-plan cottage, extended in 1913 with a two-storey range to the west in matching style and a hipped kitchen range at right angles, incorporating a boiler and coal house with an outside WC to the north. The materials are rendered brick with exposed red brick used for the chimneys and buttresses; the roofs are tiled.

The main entrance range faces east under a gableted roof, while the original wings and the 1913 extension have hipped roofs. Tall and slender brick chimney stacks with cream chimney pots rise from the structure. Windows are oak-framed with leaded lights throughout.

The main entrance is through a rounded archway with tile detailing, leading to an enclosed porch. The front door, set at right angles to the entrance arch, is an original Baillie Scott design: a broad and solid panelled door noted as exemplifying his approach to front door design. To the south of the entrance is a four-light flat-roofed dormer providing clerestory light into the main hall. A square bay window and shallow raking buttresses flanking the entrance complete the east elevation. The west garden elevation is less coherent in composition, showing the internal courtyard of the original cottage together with the 1913 extension.

Internally, the original configuration centres on the U-shaped corridor around an internal courtyard, with two reception rooms to the south-east and north-east. The north-east room opens from the entrance lobby; the south-east reception room is an impressive hall, now used as the drawing room. The reception room off the entrance hall has a herringbone brick floor and panelled walls, leading to the corridor which retains exposed posts and beams with curving braces, painted white, some brick noggin and wooden floorboards. (The timbers were likely originally unpainted, as Baillie Scott chose wood carefully for its quality and colour.)

The hall, or drawing room, is the most impressive interior space, open to collar height. It features exposed oak structural timbers including posts, arch braces, truss and curving struts. An inglenook fireplace has a brick hearth and an oak bressumer carved with the inscription: 'Elen Mary Stratford Hill, wife of Arthur Norman Hill of Liverpool, built this house in 1906'. The inglenook is lit by a small window in the west wall. Many original broad plank internal doors survive with original iron furniture, wooden latches and finger plates. Much original iron window furniture also remains. Original fireplaces typified by tile surrounds or mantles survive, although some have been removed (particularly on the first floor) and the dining room fireplace is a replacement.

In the ground floor bedroom at the west end of the 1913 extension is a painted inscription reading: 'AND IT FELL UPON A DAY OF DAYS THAT THEY WERE IN A GREEN PLACE AND THEY WERE IN THE SUN AND OUT OF THE WIND AND THEY WERE NEAR THEIR FRIENDS AND THEY COULD SEE EVERYONE AND NO ONE COULD SEE THEM'. This motto, with slightly different wording, was originally in the dining room but was removed and repainted in this bedroom, possibly by Arthur Hill. The inscription, drawn from a Celtic fairy tale, was chosen by the architect and his clients to reflect sentiments about settling the house in a rural landscape. Opposite this bedroom is a small ground floor dressing room with Delft tiles to the fire surround, a cast iron grate and floor to ceiling panelled walls. The kitchen has been opened up and modernised with a reinforced steel joist spanning it, but the pantry and utility room retain their original stone slabs for cool storage.

A garden building to the north-east, also designed by Baillie Scott in matching style, features roughcast rendered brick walls with an exposed brick raking buttress, a pitched tiled roof and leaded casements in oak frames. A post supporting the roof at its north-west corner creates a covered porch and entrance. This building relates to the early holiday cottage as shown on the 1910 Ordnance Survey map.

Green Place was designed as a holiday cottage but was enlarged in 1913 to provide permanent accommodation; the Hills lived in the house from circa 1920 onwards. Ellen Mary's husband, Arthur Norman Hill (known as Norman Hill), was solicitor for the White Star Line during the Titanic and Lusitania enquiries, was knighted for services to shipping and elevated to the baronetcy for his work during the First World War. The house was subsequently owned by Lady Barbara Wykeham, an architect and painter known professionally as Barbara Priestley and daughter of the writer JB Priestley.

Recent alterations and additions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries include a reinforced steel joist supporting the kitchen ceiling following the removal of an earlier wall to open up this space, the relocation of the door into the Hobby Room, and insertion of cupboards and modern French doors leading to a former polycarbonate conservatory (now demolished). Some roof tiles have been replaced with machine-made tiles.

MH Baillie Scott (1865-1945) was a notable architect of the Arts and Crafts style, an English aesthetic reformist movement at its height between approximately 1880 and 1910. The movement was a reaction against perceived soulless mechanisation and advocated a return to quality craftsmanship in an affordable manner, influencing architecture, garden design, decorative arts and crafts, and furniture design. Baillie Scott was a prolific architect in this genre with over 300 designs to his name, though not all were realised.