Hillstead

Hillstead is a detached house dated 1852. It is constructed of limestone ashlar with a hipped slate roof to the south-west garden front, featuring moulded external stacks. The house has a double-depth plan with a small hip-roofed lean-to service wing on the ground floor and a basement in the rear (north) corner. The three-storey building, including an attic, features an entrance front with three windows. Architectural details include a dentil eaves cornice, a first floor cornice, a cornice band with brackets flanking the windows and paired to the quoins, a ground floor platband, and a plinth. The left-hand range of the north-west entrance front steps forward, topped by a pediment containing a datestone. This range includes a sash window with horizontal glazing bars and a bracketed sill below the cornice, and a similar ground floor window with a raised eared surround and a keystone dying into the platband. Centrally, a plate glass window illuminates the attic, set within a raised surround surmounted by a semicircular fanlight above a French window opening onto a roof balcony over a projecting porch with pierced stone balustrade. Steps lead to double doors. The right-hand range has blind windows with surrounds similar to the French window, set into an external stack with a smaller blind panel and a bracketed cornice. The garden return to the right features plate glass sash windows to the upper floors and two/two-pane sashes to the ground floor. A full-height hip-roofed canted bay to the left has a sill band to the attic storey and bracketed sills to the first floor, while to the right are paired attic windows above a two-storey canted bay with recessed circles to the parapet. A stack rises through each floor, flanked on each floor by narrow windows. The left return boasts external stacks to both gabled ranges and two/two-pane sash windows to the upper floors. The interior was not inspected. The design shows a clear influence from Vanbrugh’s King’s Weston House near Bristol, circa 1710, particularly in its arched chimneystacks, and embodies the eclectic historicism popular in the early Victorian era.