Kennet House

Kennet House is a detached house dating from around 1840. It is constructed of limestone ashlar with a steeply pitched concrete tile roof and wooden bargeboards to the gables. The house is arranged in an L-plan, with a 20th-century wing added to the left. The front facade is three bays and two storeys high. It features a plinth, flat arches with label moulds over the two-light stone mullioned casement windows, which contain small panes of glass. The left bay projects forward and has a stone-roofed bay window on the ground floor. Above, there’s a pair of lights beneath a hood mould to the first floor, and a slatted louvre within the gable, which is enriched with open cusped bargeboards beneath a finial. The finial has a wrought iron weathervane. A gabled porch is set centrally, featuring moulded coping, a diagonal stone finial, a pointed arched opening, and a two-panelled door. The right bay has two two-light windows with hood moulds. The right return has a projecting gable to the left and a three-light window to the right. Some of the windows retain crown glass. Inside, the house contains mid-19th century six-panel doors with architraves, along with fire surrounds featuring roundels to the block corners, reeded jambs and lintels. Kennet House is an early, picturesquely conceived house, reflecting a late Georgian departure from classical terraces, and drawing clear influence from Edward Davis’s Gothic Farm House in Victoria Park of 1830.