The Poult House

The Poult House is a house dating from the mid to late 17th century, with alterations and extensions from the 19th and 20th centuries. It is constructed of whitewashed English bond brick with some tile-hung timber framing, featuring brick stacks and chimneyshafts. The kitchen has a staggered chimneyshaft, which is original, and the roof is covered in peg tiles.

The house has an L-shaped plan. The main block, facing south east, comprises two rooms. An axial stack between the rooms serves the larger left room, originally a parlour, with a front lobby entrance and a winder stair rising behind the stack. A smaller room, a 19th-century addition, originally an unheated service room, has a projecting end stack. A single-room-plan kitchen block projects at right angles to the rear of the parlour, with a gable-end stack. Further extensions include a 20th-century flat-roofed projection to the rear of the kitchen, a recessed extension to the right of the main block, and a single-storey extension in the angle of the two wings with a lateral stack. The main house is two storeys high, with attic space in the roof.

The front elevation is asymmetrical, featuring various 20th-century casement windows and a 20th-century French window on the ground floor to the left. A gabled brick porch, also from the 19th century, contains a 19th-century part-glazed six-panel door. The roof has half-hipped ends. The left end wall has three 20th-century French windows.

The internal structure of the 17th-century house remains largely intact. The brick fireplaces in the kitchen and parlour are large, with plain oak lintels. The axial beam in the former service room is chamfered with scroll stops. The kitchen crossbeam is simply chamfered. The parlour’s crossbeam and joists are chamfered with scroll stops, while irregularities in the joisting suggest a possible small lobby originally existed between the kitchen and parlour. Similar carpentry is found on the first floor and in the roof, which has collared tie-beam trusses with butt purlins. Some early joinery detail remains, including a two-panel door between the kitchen and parlour, although much of the joinery is from the 19th and 20th centuries.