North Lodge, West Lodge, East Lodge And Attached Walls (Within The Grounds Of Ridgemead)

Three linked gate lodges with attached walls and gateways form the entrance to Ridgemead. The lodges were built in 1938 by Robert Lutyens for Captain Woolf Barnato. They are constructed of white-painted brick with ashlar dressings and pantile roofs. The lodges and walls curve across three quadrants of a circle, with the driveway positioned between walls attached to East Lodge (on the east) and West Lodge (on the west). The wall extends from West Lodge to North Lodge, interrupted by a gateway leading to a courtyard that is screened from the road by another section of wall running westward from West Lodge. The design is in a Spanish Mission style, creating a composition facing inwards towards the center.

The lodges are two storeys high, with three bays each, and have rear wings. The walls are approximately 3 metres high, featuring flat ashlar coping that projects forward at gateways, forming cruciform-section piers with ashlar plinths, quoins, cornices, hanging stiles, and ornate lanterns. The original wooden driveway gates have been removed, but simple decorated double iron gates remain to the courtyard, set beneath a radial fan.

Each lodge originally had a central two-panel door – East Lodge’s is half-glazed, and North Lodge’s has been replaced by a glazed door – within a stone architrave, beneath an open pediment supported by attached square columns. North Lodge has two decorative panels below the pediment, while West Lodge has flanking pilasters supporting a pulvinated frieze and cornice. The windows are two-light leaded wood casements with louvred shutters and a first-floor sill band that continues as wall coping. East Lodge has a French window onto a corbelled decorative iron-railed balcony. The roofs are swept and oversailing, with central stacks. East Lodge’s left return has a bay window and door, sheltered by a bracketed hipped roof. West Lodge’s rear (road front) includes a French window onto an iron balcony to the first floor on the left, with a wall continuing to the left alongside a pointed-arched doorway, and a single-storey addition on the right that is not of special interest.

Interior inspection was partial, but East Lodge features a decorative ashlar fireplace with a chamfered Tudor-arched opening and floral motifs to the spandrels.