Parsonage House And Attached Forecourt Walls, Gates And Gatepiers And Rear Wall With Outbuilding

Parsonage House and Attached Forecourt Walls, Gates and Gatepiers and Rear Wall with Outbuilding, Stanton Harcourt

A house built circa 1675 for Robert Huntingdon, constructed in Carolean style. The main building is roughcast over limestone rubble with rendered limestone ashlar quoins, topped by a hipped stone slate roof. Two stone ridge stacks with moulded drips and capping are set above the main roof line, with a large stone lateral stack to the rear.

The house has two storeys and an attic, arranged on a double-depth plan with a rear left wing. The principal façade presents a symmetrical seven-window range. The centrepiece is a grand doorway with Tuscan pilasters and a wood-bracketed pediment hood, containing bolection-moulded double-leaf doors with leaded overlight. Windows are late 17th-century cross windows with leaded-lights, set beneath flat rendered arches. A coved cornice runs beneath the eaves, and two hipped roof dormers with leaded casements pierce the roofline.

The side walls are similar in treatment, featuring five-bay fenestration with comparable cross windows. Stone steps on the right side lead to a 20th-century door. A cellar door opens to the rear service wing. The rear service wing is of one storey and attic, built in matching materials, with similar cross windows, wood-mullioned windows with leaded-lights, and a chamfered heavy wood frame to its door.

Internally, the central hall contains a bolection-moulded panelled fireplace with flanking doors and pictures of Roman Emperors and pastoral and townscape scenes, including a view of Whitehall probably by James de Witte. A fine dog-leg staircase with landing rises from the hall, featuring twisted balusters.

The parlour to the right has bolection panelling grained to imitate walnut. Its fireplace is bolection-moulded and flanked by two tall narrow panels decorated with flowers, probably also by de Witte. Ground-floor rooms throughout have bolection-panelled walls. One rear room contains a 1920s overmantel painting of the Siege of Paris, much restored in that decade.

First-floor rooms are each fitted with moulded cornices, bolection-moulded fireplaces, overmantels, and doors. The overmantel paintings include Europa and the Bull (above the hall), a classical landscape with ruins and shepherds (rear right), and oriental birds (rear left), probably executed by James de Witte and restored in the 1920s.

The service area to the rear left of the ground floor contains a dog-leg service staircase with turned balusters. The kitchen preserves a large chamfered stone fireplace with a late 17th-century spit-rack and hanging carved spice-rack, together with part of a late 17th-century cupboard range.

The subsidiary features include limestone rubble forecourt walls enclosing an area approximately 25 by 15 metres, with decorative wrought-iron gates flanked by limestone rubble gatepiers topped with ball finials. A limestone rubble wall extends approximately 10 metres to the rear right, terminating at a small gazebo or shed of limestone rubble with a pyramidal stone slate roof.

The house stands on a medieval moated site. The rear of the building is probably 16th-century in part. Robert Huntingdon leased the house from All Souls College, Oxford. James de Witte, a Dutch painter and prisoner-of-war imprisoned at Abingdon, probably painted the overmantels and hall pictures, which are of considerable historical and artistic interest.