Bicton Old Rectory

Bicton Old Rectory is a house originally built as a rectory in the early or mid 18th century. It was remodelled and extended in the early 19th century, with a twentieth-century extension added later.

The main house is built of red brick in Flemish bond with a limestone cornice and coping. The rear service wing is constructed of plastered cob on rubble footings, with a timber-framed secondary stair turret. Brick chimney stacks have plastered shafts and many nineteenth-century chimney pots. The roof is slate, hipped at each end.

The building faces south-east. The main block is rectangular with a double-depth plan containing two front and back rooms, with axial stacks positioned between them. The stair is set between the two rear rooms, and the rear left (south-western) room serves as the entrance lobby. Behind the main house is a small courtyard enclosed by service rooms. These service rooms are mostly late eighteenth century and single storey, though the left (south-western) wing is two storeys and built of cob, and may be earlier. The secondary stair turret rises from the rear of this wing against the main house. The evidence suggests the early to mid eighteenth-century house originally had a central front doorway leading to the stairs, but was rearranged in the early nineteenth century to its present layout, with a garden front featuring a verandah and side entrance.

The main house is two storeys with attics. The front elevation is symmetrical with three windows. The ground floor windows date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: a twelve-pane horned sash is flanked by French windows with margin panes. The first floor contains early nineteenth-century twelve-pane sashes. All windows have flat skewback arches above, and the centre window is narrower than the others. An early nineteenth-century verandah spans the front, its later timber posts and boards forming wide segmental arches and carrying a tented zinc roof. A soffit-moulded limestone eaves cornice and parapet with plain coping, probably part of the early nineteenth-century refurbishment, run along the top of the main elevation.

The end return walls are similar in style but without the verandah. The left (south-western) end contains the present main doorway just left of centre, a nineteenth-century six-panel door with overlight featuring diagonal glazing bars, panelled reveals, and a flat hood with moulded edges on shaped brackets. A twelve-pane sash is positioned to its left and another above the door, with two attic dormer windows with hipped roofs. The right (north-eastern) end has a two-window front of twelve-pane sashes, some of which are eighteenth-century with thick glazing bars, and a nineteenth-century French window with glazing bars in a bow window at ground floor left. Two more attic dormers appear on this elevation. The single storey service wing continues along this side without a break in the brickwork.

The service wings include various nineteenth and twentieth-century casements, most with glazing bars. The rear of the main house features a large round-headed fixed pane window with glazing bars in the centre, lighting the main stair. The secondary stair turret includes a round-headed sash window with glazing bars; this window appears to be eighteenth-century with thick glazing bars and may have been removed from the main stair window and reused here during the early nineteenth-century alterations. The turret is plastered and partly slate hung on the south-western side. A wrought iron weathervane, probably nineteenth-century, stands on the main roof.

The twentieth-century extension on the left (south-western) side is built of brick in a similar style to the main house and includes horned sashes with glazing bars.

The interior contains much late eighteenth and nineteenth-century detail including joinery, a marble chimneypiece, and moulded plaster cornices. The main stair is original, a dogleg oak stair with open string and shaped stair brackets, turned newel posts, turned balusters with blocks, a moulded flat handrail, curtail step, and scrolled wreath. The secondary stair is nineteenth-century with stick balusters. The cob service wing shows no visible carpentry detail.