Elizabethan House Museum

This is a probable early 17th-century merchant's house, located on New Street in the Barbican area of Plymouth, and restored in 1926 by A.S. Parker. It is a building of group value, representing a significant example of its type. The house is built with a timber frame, rendered on the jettied front, and has a side wall of painted rubble on the right. Slate hanging is visible on the left return, and the steeply pitched slate roofs feature a projecting front gable with moulded pendants. Large rubble stacks are positioned on the right side of the building.

The house has a fairly shallow double-depth plan, incorporating a rear stair projection. The exterior is three storeys high, with a cellar below. The first floor has a wide, central, four-light mullioned oriel window with sidelights, supported by shaped and carved brackets, and a further three-light oriel window in the gable above. The ground floor features an original heavy moulded doorframe, an inner doorframe, and a five-light mullioned window on the right. Original and restored windows have ovolo-moulded mullions and frames. The basement windows are fitted with iron grills.

The rear of the house includes a stair outshut, and irregular mullioned windows illuminate the rear room and the chambers above. The staircase itself has single-light windows.

Inside, many original features remain, including a fine moulded muntin and plank screen to the right of the passage. The roof structure features threaded purlins and dovetailed collars. Original moulded doorframes and planked doors are present, alongside canted chamfered granite fireplaces with ovolo-moulded oak lintels (copies are on the ground floor) and floors of beach pebbles laid in a herringbone pattern. A newel staircase includes an original pole (ship’s mast) as its newel, with 20th-century oak treads. A fine, late 17th-century painted corner cupboard is situated in a rear first-floor room, featuring a moulded outer frame and a round-arched niche with panelled pilasters. Wide pine floorboards cover what are possibly the original floors, and the remains of a 19th-century cloam oven are found in the fireplace of the rear ground-floor room. The building is notable as a remarkably complete and unaltered example of a jettied merchant's house in Plymouth, contributing to the high quality of architecture found on New Street.