Front Range of Broadoaks Motor House

Front Range of Broadoaks Motor House

This is the front range of a courtyard-plan motor house, built around 1905.

The building is constructed of red brick laid in Flemish bond, with limestone dressings. Windows are a mixture of timber-framed and metal-framed casements, fitted with square leaded quarries. The roofs are covered in red clay tile.

The building has a long, narrow footprint and faces west. It is single storey, except for a central two-storey frontispiece containing chauffeur's accommodation positioned above a central carriageway. This frontispiece is flanked by single-storey wings on either side. The surrounding north and south ranges, which are not included in the listing, contain garaging and vehicle repair facilities. The rooms here suggest they were primarily designed to serve resident and visiting staff.

The exterior is executed in Arts and Crafts style. The main roof is hipped, with exposed rafter feet and decorative brick cogging applied to the north and south half-gables. Ground-floor window openings have segmental arches formed of a double row of headers, with sills and tympana of layered clay tile.

The frontispiece is centred on the composition and projects forward of the flanking wings, with swept corners. The central carriageway arch is dressed and buttressed with moulded limestone and flanked by two small windows. Above it, a row of six lights is set within a dressed stone frame, with two further openings to either side—one remains a window, whilst the other has been replaced with a door providing access to a metal fire-escape stair. The composition culminates in a shaped, gable-ended clock-tower that projects through the eaves of the hipped roof. The roof itself has swept corners and drops into catslides on either side to form a pair of roof dormers over the single-storey side wings. Two tall brick stacks with stepped heads rise above these dormers. The side wings have half-hipped roofs and are lit by leaded timber casement windows. The south wing windows have been replaced, but the openings are original; their smaller proportions and greater height, combined with a small roof vent, suggest there may have been horse stabling within.

The interior chauffeur's accommodation on the first floor is simply finished but retains original joinery. A central unheated room sits above the arch, flanked by two rooms with Arts and Crafts style cast iron fireplaces (the northern fireplace has been removed from its opening but remains in the room). Within the carriageway are the original timber carriageway doors, which are not currently fixed in place. These doors have concave heads, so when closed as a pair they form a curve opposing the arch above. Each door has six fielded panels and decorative studwork. Several ground-floor rooms are lined in maroon glazed tiles. The northernmost room is lined with vertical three-quarter-height match-boarding and has a parquet floor. This room contains a shallow wall-mounted cupboard with glass doors, of original construction with decorative joinery, whose purpose is unknown. Service pipework runs through the adjoining room and outer lobby in a crude installation indicating later addition.