11 And 12, Henrietta Villas

A pair of semi-detached houses built around 1840, with later 19th-century additions. The houses are constructed from limestone ashlar with a shallow-pitched slate roof, wide eaves, and a moulded central stack. They have a double-depth plan and a two-story rear extension. Each house is three stories high with a semi-basement, and they each present a two-window frontage. Features include deeply rusticated quoins, a banded pilaster to the party wall, four/four-pane sash windows, a returned second-floor sill band, moulded brackets to the front, and raised surrounds to the windows. Moulded architraves, sill bands, and balconettes with diagonal-crossed rails feature on the first-floor windows. Similar balconettes, architraves, and cornices are on consoles to the ground-floor windows. The two/two-pane windows in the semi-basement have simple surrounds. Steps lead to Tuscan doorcases with pilasters and blocking courses on the left returns. Number 11 has a margin-pane overlight to a bolection-moulded four-panel door sheltered by a swept canopy. Number 12 has steps leading to a single-story porch with a leaded overlight above a bolection-moulded four-panel door. The interior of Number 11, inspected in 1984, contains a good glazed rear door, a flagged floor, and an original meat safe. The houses are located along a historic footpath connecting Bath and Bathwick. Initially planned as part of a larger development called Frances Square (shown on Chantry's plan of 1793 and Donne's plan of 1810), the development was later scaled back and executed in a Late Georgian style. They were noted as "newly erected" in the Bath Guide for 1853 and appear on Cotterell’s 1851 plan of Bath.