Kenward

House, probably dating from the late 1840s or 1850s, with some twentieth-century internal refurbishment. Built in yellow stock brick laid in English bond with yellow sandstone and some blue brick dressings. The west elevation is partly tile-hung with bands of inverted scalloped tiles and some pebble-dashing. The roof is covered in peg tiles with crested ridge tiles and brick stacks. The building is designed in the Gothic Revival style, though of an unarchaeological character.

The plan is asymmetrical. The principal block is basically rectangular, set on a north-south axis beneath a two-span roof, with the entrance on the east side. Service rooms occupy various irregular blocks adjoining to the north. The entrance leads into a corridor with the stair hall beyond, and a second corridor from the stair hall extends to a garden door on the south elevation. The principal rooms face south and west.

The building is two storeys with an attic. The steep gabled roofs feature coped gables with kneelers, finials, and elaborate brick shafts to the stacks, some of which are clustered, some octagonal in plan, and some square with moulded, brattished cornices. The original window openings mostly have cranked heads and are glazed with plate glass high transomed casements. Triangular attic dormers have trefoil windows, and the gables are topped with finials.

The asymmetrical east front presents a 1:3:2:1 composition, with the three-window main block set back between gabled projections. A three-bay narthex in a rustic seventeenth-century style crosses the main block and features piers with banded rustication, nineteenth-century patterned floor tiles, and a parapet with a pair of engaged octagonal shafts at the centre, crowned with heraldic beasts on either side of a crest carved in relief. The front door is in an eclectic style with lozenge panelling in a seventeenth-century manner, set beneath a fanlight glazed in imitation of a rose window with egg-and-dart moulding framing it. One-light windows with stained glass flank the front door. The first floor has three two-light casements and two gabled dormers. The gabled block to the left (south) has a projecting stack with a corbel to one of the first floor flues and a one-light attic chimney window, with a row of elaborate chimney-shafts above. The south-east corner features a diagonally-positioned projecting bay with a battered stone roof and a two-light square-headed high-transomed casement. A two-window gabled block is positioned to the right of the narthex, beyond which lies a single-storey block gabled to the east.

The left (south) return continues in the same style with two gables to the south. The right-hand gable has a two-storey shallow rectangular bay with a parapet and four-light mullioned windows with chamfered stone mullions and cranked arched lights. A two-leaf glazed garden door with a cranked arch and high transom opens to the garden. An angled bay across the south-west corner matches the bay at the south-east corner.

The west elevation, which is largely tile-hung, has a gabled projection to the left of the main block containing a two-storey canted bay with a row of one-light cranked arched windows to the first floor and square-headed windows to the ground floor. The irregular service blocks set back to the left have similar cranked arched windows.

The interior contains a mixture of early nineteenth-century and twentieth-century features with little later alteration. The stair has turned balusters, and some rooms are fitted out with Adam-style panelling and chimney-pieces.

This is a very striking and rather idiosyncratic Gothic Revival house.