Magnolia Cottage Stoke Allbrooke Upper House Waverley Cottage

This is a cottage, extended significantly throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and now divided into three separate dwellings: Upper House, Stoke Allbrooke Waverley Cottage, and Magnolia Cottage. The original core of the building dates back to the 16th century, with substantial additions and alterations made by the renowned architect Richard Norman Shaw beginning in 1874. Further work followed in 1880, 1887-88, commissioned by Mrs Elinor Guthrie, later Mrs Arbuthnot, along with later additions to Shaw’s work.

The original cottage section has a timber frame, with brick cladding to the lower part and a fishscale patterned tile hanging to the upper part. It has a hipped, plain tiled roof with decorative bargeboards on the gable wing. The front of the building is characterised by double whitewashed timber gables with bargeboards, brickwork and tile hanging. An offset star-shaped stack is located to the right. The rear entrance front features mullioned and transomed windows, a gabled porch, and a Tudor-style door decorated with a plaster relief of Adam and Eve. A projecting gable displays chevron bracing and a five-light window, with a jettied first floor supported by dragon posts. A single-storey brick extension from the 1960s, now serving as Magnolia Cottage, is of little architectural interest.

The garden front exhibits decorative stacks, including crowstepped and chevroned ones to the right, with tile hanging over a brick ground floor. It includes diamond-pane leaded casement windows, an oriel window on the first floor to the right, gabled dormers to the left, and a square bay window to the left. Many windows feature finely carved lintels.

Interior features include a finely crafted staircase with twisted balusters and scrolled tread ends, carved panels in the entrance porch, plasterwork ceilings, and panelling in some rooms. A large, three-bay hall, built in a medieval style, contains a massive stone fireplace, a crown post roof, and a plasterwork relief panel on the end wall. A wooden pump casing is attached to the wall on the right-hand return front, carved with bird motifs and featuring a metal handle.