The Whim

The Whim is a house built between 1874 and 1878 on Park Road in Hythe, designed by its owner Henry Scott and constructed by the local builder Mr Evernden. It is a remarkable circular, single-storey timber-framed building that survives substantially intact with its original plan form.

The exterior is clad in grooved weatherboarding and roofed in slate with terracotta ridge tiles. Four small cement-rendered chimneys with tall plain chimneypots project from the roof. The cornice consists of wooden pointed and fretted fascia boards that run around the building. Twelve tall narrow sash windows with horns but without glazing bars are set in moulded architraves; iron hooks and grooves cut into the window surrounds show that shutters were originally present.

The original main entrance to the north, approached through a porch with a tented canopy, has been largely incorporated into a single-storey early 20th-century extension. The current entrance is on the east side, originally the service entrance, and has a four-panelled half-glazed door with rectangular fanlight. The early 20th-century extension is partly weatherboarded and partly rendered, with a combination of slate, felt and corrugated asbestos roofs, and either fixed sash windows or mullioned and transomed casement windows.

The interior plan is entirely circular. A narrow hall leads to a central circular atrium containing a glazed conservatory, originally built as a fernery with no roof but given a flat wooden roof in the 20th century. The conservatory has glazed panels with thin moulded glazing bars over plank panelling to the base and two half-glazed doors. Both conservatory and corridor have tiled floors. The inner corridor is lined with plank panelling and has a circular hipped boarded roof. Eight four-fielded panelled doors with moulded architraves open from the corridor to the segment-shaped rooms beyond. The principal rooms—kitchen, dining room, drawing room and bedroom—have interconnecting doors in the partition walls. The drawing room retains a reeded cornice and moulded plate shelf. Both drawing room and dining room have tiled fireplace surrounds from the original American stoves, the dining room retaining late 19th-century floral tiles.

Henry Scott, a grocer, valuer and businessman with premises in Ashford, designed the house using a set of compasses, having been unable to find an existing design to his satisfaction. He wanted a residence on one floor with a circular arrangement containing a central unroofed fernery whose walls formed a corridor that served as both smoking room and picture gallery, with the outer roofed circle containing the living compartments. The building originally included a stable and coachhouse. An article in the Hythe and Sandgate Advertiser of 26 February 1886 describes the unusual heating system of American stoves in every room, which Scott believed retained heat that would otherwise escape up the chimney. There were also earth closets and coloured glass in the entrance on the east side. Scott died on 3 November 1892, and his property passed to his son John Paul Scott and in trust to his wife. The building does not appear on the 1877 Ordnance Survey map but is shown on the 1899 map, confirming its construction date. Mrs Scott probably occupied the house until 1896, when the local directory records it as untenanted.