Temple Hill

Temple Hill is a house dating from circa 1850, carefully modernised circa 1983. It stands on Yettington Road in East Budleigh.

The house is built of stucco over brick walls, with some stone rubble. It has brick chimney stacks with plastered shafts and a slate roof with some tile to the rear. The main block faces south-west with a double-depth plan and is two rooms wide, arranged with the principal domestic rooms to the front, each with end stacks. The entrance is approached from the rear of the left (north-western) side, leading directly into a large entrance hall and stair positioned behind the front left room. A small room occupies the rear of the right front room, with an integral two-storey outshot behind it. The kitchen block projects at right angles from behind the entrance hall, extending slightly from the left end and featuring a gable-end stack. Behind the house a small courtyard is enclosed by service buildings, including a tall single-storey block lit from the top with an end stack, probably once a billiard room. The main block is two storeys with attics.

The architecture is Tudor Gothic in style. The symmetrical three-window front features a tall round-headed niche at ground floor level in the centre, with a flat architrave and hoodmould containing a moulded lion's head water spout and lobed half basin. The niche is flanked by flat-roofed bays projecting square, with panelled corner shafts, moulded cornices and original French windows. The cornice is carried across over the central alcove as a dripcourse. The first floor windows have Tudor-style hoodmoulds and contain horned four-pane sashes with unusual horizontal glazing bars. All windows have shaped vallances for external blinds. The stucco front is lightly incised as ashlar with quoins at the corners. A moulded eaves cornice and low parapet with soffit-moulded coping crown the front. The parapet is interrupted by three attic dormers with horned round-headed sashes without glazing bars, architraves with panelled imposts and moulded heads resting on large blocks on shaped brackets. The roof is hipped at each end. The chimney shafts have soffit-moulded coping.

On the left end, the entrance front, the main block has its main doorway to the rear with another horned sash with hoodmould above and a round-headed dormer above that. The doorway contains a part-glazed door with margin panes and lies behind a flat-roofed porch flush with the kitchen behind. The porch contains a part-glazed panelled door with fanlight and side lights, stucco imposts and a moulded head with a rusticated keystone which interrupts the eaves cornice. The moulded coping of the low parapet matches that on the kitchen block. The kitchen has a two-window front with horned sashes with hoodmoulds and soffit-moulded sills to the ground floor, and twin round-headed lancets to the first floor. The right end wall has an irregular two-window front with a third window to the outshot, all horned sashes but only the latter with hoodmoulds.

The interior is largely original and remarkably well-preserved. The main rooms have marble chimneypieces and moulded plaster cornices in a kind of Jacobethan style. The joinery detail is of high quality, including a large open well stair, again vaguely Jacobethan in style. It has an open string with shaped stair brackets, square newel posts with pyramid caps, a mahogany handrail and turned balusters. It is lit by a skylight. Many of the brass door handles and fittings are original. The front ground floor rooms have ornate brass bell pulls enriched with openwork patterns and painted porcelain handles. In the service outshot the bells remain, each with a different tone.