St Martha'S Priory Including The Garage Building, Enclosed Courtyards With Cob Walls And Gateways, Paved Terrace, Retaining Wall And Flight Of Garden Steps

St Martha's Priory, built in 1932 by architect AC Burlingham FRIBA for Captain Hugh Deacon, comprises a house designed as a pavilion and lodge, a garage building, and enclosed courtyards with connecting cob walls, gateways, paved terrace, retaining wall, and flight of garden steps. The complex was designed in an inter-war Arts and Crafts inspired vernacular revival manner.

The house is cruciform in plan and symmetrical on north-south and east-west axes, of one-and-a-half storeys with a tall jettied gable supported on brackets with carved ends on the north elevation and lower gabled bays to the east, west, and south. Construction is pegged timber frame, rendered over a nine-inch brick core, set on a tall brick plinth, with thatched roofs and brick stacks. A tall central brick stack has a chamfered fillet on each face.

The main entrance is on the north elevation, with a front door having moulded stiles and rails and a shaped head, accompanied by an iron letter box with a bell. The south elevation has a pair of part-glazed doors. Windows are metal-framed casements with rectangular leaded lights, set symmetrically either side of the entrances, with upper floor windows of two- or three-light mullions similarly glazed.

The interior contains a passage with a glazed overlight leading to a large open hall, labelled as sitting room on Burlingham's plans, with an open truss roof and a small balustraded gallery in the gable over the entrance to the garden. The fireplace features a large four-centre arched stone chimneypiece with carved spandrels, lined in diagonally set brick with a cast iron fireback. A bedroom formerly separate from the sitting room is now incorporated into the space. To the west is a bathroom with black and white inter-war wall tiles. The dining room, west of the front door, was until recently fully panelled with a fluted cornice and similarly panelled doors. Stairs have square newels and balusters.

The rectangular garage building is one-and-a-half storeys, set into the hill with a lower level garden room at the southern end. The garage occupies the northern end with a flat above reached by stairs behind the west elevation entrance. Stairs from the garden room rise to bedrooms and a bathroom. The building is similarly treated to the house with some brick nogging on the south and west elevations. A central ridge stack matches that on the main house. The east elevation features a recessed verandah set between outer bays, with moulded muntins doors at either end, and two eyebrow dormers with two-light metal-framed casements with rectangular leaded lights. The garage door is a horizontal sliding panelled door jointed in sections and mounted on runners.

The garden room was, until recently, panelled like the dining room and has moulded encased beams, though its fireplace has been removed. The hall and stairwell are panelled, the panelling possibly introduced from elsewhere. Stairs have robust square newels with carved finials and splat balusters. The upper floor bathroom is tiled similarly to that in the main house. Outbuildings and greenhouses attached to the west are not of special interest.

The buildings are linked by thatched cob walls which enclose courtyard gardens to the east and west of the house. Doorways with moulded posts and doors with moulded muntins lead from the drive to the courtyards, which have low stone retaining walls and stone flag paving. The house sits on a paved terrace behind a stone retaining wall, with a central flight of semicircular stone steps descending to the field below.

The house is marked on the 1935 Ordnance Survey map as St Martha's Priory Lodge, implying it was conceived as a precursor to a larger building intended to be built to the east at the end of the drive, also shown on the map. Although Burlingham's drawings for a lodge and garage survive, no record exists of a larger house design, suggesting none was developed, which may explain discrepancies between the drawings and the extant buildings, which were adapted either during construction or shortly afterwards.

AC Burlingham (1885–1963) trained at Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts, strongly influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. He moved to Surrey in 1909 and to Guildford in 1911, where he emulated the work of influential Surrey Arts and Crafts and Vernacular Revival architects such as Baillie Scott. He designed at least seventy houses, shops, and a factory in the area, with his most notable work being Abbotswood, Guildford, a suburban development of Arts and Crafts inspired houses laid out in Garden City manner from 1912 onwards. This was followed by smaller estates including the Orchard Estate, Burpham, in 1926 and The Merrow Downs Estate in 1927, along with other individual houses in the Guildford area. He was most prolific in the inter-war period, when his work exemplifies the national shift from true Arts and Crafts to Tudor Revival, commonly seen in Surrey.