31 Baldon Row, Toot Baldon

31 Baldon Row, Toot Baldon

This is a two-storey house with attics, built in limestone rubble and dressed stone with brick dressings to the main south-facing elevation. The roof is plain tile with brick stacks. The structural timbers are oak and elm.

The house was originally laid out as a two-cell plan with a rear outshut beneath a catslide roof and integral gable end stacks, with the main living space and kitchen likely positioned to the east and the parlour to the west. A single-storey kitchen wing was added or replaced to the east. By the end of the 19th century the house had been divided into two cottages, each with its own entrance in the gable wall; the former western entrance is now a window. The ground floor has since been opened up, removing the original internal transverse walls. The stairs have been removed and replaced in the late 20th century. The eastern stack comprises a large fireplace with an adjacent bread oven. The lower pitched-roof service wing has a gable wall stack. The plan and asymmetrical four-bay arrangement of the south elevation represent an unusual synthesis of vernacular tradition and fashionable polite architecture of the period.

The south elevation is in limestone rubble on a shallow chamfered stone plinth with flush red and brown brick quoins and dressings. Deep horizontal bands of five courses of brick respond to the quoins and link the inner first-floor windows, creating a formal grid in 18th-century manner. The ground floor retains the remains of a similar arrangement, though it has been altered and repaired. All windows have shallow cambered arches; those on the first floor are in 18th and 19th-century brick and set close beneath the eaves with concrete cills. The central pair of ground-floor windows have earlier 18th-century brick cambered arches. Ground-floor window openings have been reduced or enlarged in modern red brick with replaced cills, though the proportions of tall, narrow openings typical of the 18th century remain legible. The eastern window on each floor is wider; on the ground floor there is a pair of French windows. All ground-floor windows and doors are late-20th-century standardised uPVC units inserted into original openings that have been altered to accommodate them. First-floor windows are later-20th-century two and three-light casements with rectangular leaded panes. Set into the roof above the eaves are a pair of small hipped dormer windows in 18th-century manner, fitted with 20th-century timber casements. The brick gable end stacks have been rebuilt.

The west gable wall is of one build with an integrated outshut and has no plinth. A former and probably inserted side entrance has been partly blocked to form a window. The plinth appears to return to the east gable wall, which is otherwise covered by the 19th-century kitchen wing, flush with the south elevation, and by a later extension to the rear. At first-floor level there is a blocked first-floor window to the front of the stack. The northern elevation beneath the outshut has an added late-20th-century porch and a large inserted raking dormer at first-floor level which protrudes beyond the roofline. Later-20th-century doors and timber casement windows are present.

Internally, the ground floor of the front range is now a single space divided by a rebuilt transverse screen. The eastern bay is the least altered, containing a large stack in granite blocks, now painted, beneath a replaced oak bressumer with remains of a bread oven to the north of it. A deep elm spine beam with a 2 to 2½-inch chamfer and plain exposed joists are present. The western bay has a replaced ceiling and rebuilt brick fireplace. The floor level in the western cell has been lowered, and a small pit was discovered beneath the floor. The rear wall spine wall, in slender scantling timber framing with replaced brick nogging, is altered and repaired; the wall to the rear of the western bay was largely rebuilt in the late 20th century. The outshut has a slender scantling transverse partition incorporating reused timber from its original construction, where the original roof line remains visible. Reused timber is incorporated in the later-20th-century lobby and stair well. The first floor has a timber-framed transverse partition with added bracing and a deep chamfered elm axial beam to the eastern cell. A very substantial four-bay butt-purlin roof is present, though the purlins are staggered to accommodate the dormers. The rear catslide roof has been altered to accommodate the large dormer which cuts through the purlin; timber has been reused in this work.