Housetern Farmhouse

Housetern Farmhouse is a house, originally a farmhouse, dating to the early or mid 16th century. It has undergone significant alterations in the 16th and 17th centuries, with an 18th-century rear block added, and modernization occurring around 1980. The main structure is built of plastered cob on stone rubble footings, with stone rubble stacks – one retaining its original chimney shaft and the others topped with late 19th-century brickwork – and a thatched roof.

The house has an L-shaped layout. The original main block was a three-room-and-through-passage house facing north, with the smaller inner room at the western end. This inner room has an end stack, likely inserted in the 19th century. The hall has a projecting front lateral stack, and the service end room has a rear kitchen stack. A two-room rear block, dating to the 18th century, extends at right angles to the rear of the kitchen.

The front of the house presents an irregular facade with four windows, featuring 19th and 20th-century replacement casements with rectangular panes of leaded glass. A late 19th-century part-glazed panelled door is located in the front passage, left of centre, alongside the hall stack, which is plastered and shows evidence of its 17th-century origins through weathered offsets and a stone rubble chimney shaft. The roof is hipped at both ends. A circa 1980 PVC French window is set into the rear of the hall, and the rear block includes a first-floor casement with external iron bars, probably from the 19th century.

The interior reveals a multi-phase construction history. The oldest feature is the roof, a four-bay structure supported by side-pegged jointed cruck trusses with cranked collars, suggesting the house may originally have been open to the roof. Evidence suggests the end rooms were later partitioned and floored, with the hall retaining an open hearth and heavy smoke-blackening. Plastered crosswalls likely retain 16th-century carpentry. The inner room has a plain axial beam of indeterminate date and a 19th-century fireplace. The hall's ceiling, dating to the second half of the 16th century, features a 16-panel intersecting beam design with soffit-chamfered beams. The hall fireplace is probably contemporary, featuring jambs made from local conglomerate sandstone and a replacement lintel. A double shaft on the stack indicates a blocked first-floor fireplace. The kitchen is dated to the 17th century, with a soffit-chamfered crossbeam and a rubble fireplace featuring a soffit-chamfered and scroll-stopped crossbeam. The oven was inserted or relined in the 19th century. The rear block’s roof utilizes A-frame trusses with pegged lap-jointed collars and X-apexes. Most of the joinery detail dates to the 19th and 20th centuries; a few 18th-century two-panel doors are present. Housetern Farmhouse is an attractive building with notable internal features, contributing to the group value of the listed buildings along Otterton Fore Street.