Kennal Vale House, including adjoining garden walls, gate piers and gates

Kennal Vale House, including adjoining garden walls, gate-piers and gates

Small country house with adjoining garden walls and gate-piers, built around 1830. The house is constructed of stuccoed walls with a slurried scantle slate roof hipped around a square lead flat and behind parapets to both the garden fronts and entrance front. Stuccoed brick chimneys are positioned over the rear wall of each rear room. The rear wings have low-pitched roofs of corrugated iron.

The house follows a double-depth plan with two fairly large reception rooms at the principal garden front, with the deeper principal parlour on the left. The kitchen lies behind the left-hand room, while an entrance hall behind the right-hand room leads to a central rear stair hall and study. To the rear is an original and complete service courtyard flanked by two similar two-storey service wings whose doorways are linked to the house by an open lean-to cloister. The service wings are built into a high bank at the rear, and both wings have first-floor loading doorways. At the rear of the courtyard stands a high retaining wall with a central gateway leading to a flight of stone steps down to the courtyard; beneath the steps is an integral dog kennel. The plan and function of all rooms remain unaltered since the house was built.

The exterior presents two storeys with virtually complete original stuccoed elevations featuring a high plinth, mid-floor band with Vitruvian scroll, moulded parapet cornice, and plain parapet. The south-east garden front is symmetrical in a 1:1:1-bay arrangement with bowed bays to the left and right. The central bay contains an arched niche to each floor. The nearly symmetrical north-east entrance front has three windows and a doorway positioned slightly right of centre. The original six-panel door was later glazed to the top four panels and retains an original distyle Tuscan porch. Windows throughout are hornless sashes with thin glazing bars. An elliptically arched stair window features a traceried head.

The interior preserves most of its original features, including mahogany-panelled doors, moulded architraves with lion's heads in the corner blocks, and an open-well stair with a mahogany handrail scrolled over the newel. The front reception rooms contain marble chimney-pieces, and fine plasterwork throughout includes trailing bands and a cross vault over the junction between the axial and cross passage. Service rooms remain unaltered and were originally fuel stores and pantries on the ground floor, with apple stores or servants' quarters above.

Parallel to the rear of the house runs a high rubble retaining wall with square-edged granite copings. Three gateways break the wall: a narrow gateway at the rear of the courtyard, a wide gateway at the far right, and a small gateway towards the left. The gate-piers are integral with the walls and rise as square chamfered heads above them. The small gateways retain their original wrought-iron gates, featuring roundels to the lock rails, arched top rails, ball and steeple finials over the lock rails, and arrow-head finials over the top rails. At the left-hand end of the garden, the wall returns at right angles to the front.

Kennal Vale House is one of the most interesting and complete early 19th-century houses in this part of Cornwall, with the rear courtyard, its cloister, and service wings being particularly noteworthy.