Strete Ralegh House

Strete Ralegh House is a small country house, now divided into flats. It is located at Strete Ralegh, which was recorded as Estreeta in the Domesday Book and lies on the old Roman road between Exeter and Honiton.

The main house is very similar in character to Winscombe Park at Southleigh, which is dated 1826. The building underwent some modernisation in the early 20th century by the Imbert-Terry family. It is constructed of plastered brick and stone rubble with limestone ashlar dressings, brick stacks and plastered chimney-shafts, most with moulded stone coping and slate coping. The house is two storeys with attics.

The main house is rectangular in plan, with the entrance on the north long side and the garden front facing south. A little distance to the east is a service block of the same width as the main block but set at right angles to it, comprising two rooms wide under parallel roofs. The main block and former service block are joined by a narrow connecting block on the south. Most rooms are heated by a series of axial stacks. The main stair occupies the north-west corner. The early 20th century refurbishment is marked by a north porch with a one-room plan extension alongside.

The south (garden) front of the main house originally had a symmetrical four-window front. Most windows are original tall and narrow two-light timber sash windows with glazing bars, cinquefoil heads with sunk spandrels and stone Tudor-style hoodmoulds. The attic windows have had their cinquefoil heads cut off, and a couple of windows are 20th century, including one at ground floor left converted to a French window. Symmetry is disrupted by the insertion of a larger early 20th century stone mullion and transom window with hoodmould containing a rectangular pane of leaded glass. Each end corner has set-back buttresses with weathered offsets, and there is a similar buttress in the middle. Each end has a gable with stone coping, and between these gables is an embattled parapet.

The left (west) end has a two-window front in the same style, with windows of three lights that are mostly intact originals. The original north front is mostly hidden behind the early 20th century extension, but at the right (west) end a two-window section of original fenestration remains, with a late 20th century inserted doorway featuring a Queen Anne style doorcase.

The early 20th century extension has similar set-back buttresses to the old house. The windows here are distinctive stone mullion-and-transom windows containing rectangular panes of leaded glass. The entrance porch doorway is a large stone Tudor arch with moulded surround, quatrefoil panels in the spandrels and hoodmoulds which step over a plaque carved with the Imbert-Terry arms.

The former service block contains some original sashes at first-floor level, most now missing their original cinquefoil heads, some early 20th century stone-mullion windows (the connecting block contains only these), and on the east long side some conventional twelve-pane sashes and an early 19th century bow window containing a sixteen-pane sash.

The interior contains good early 19th century and early 20th century carpentry, plaster and other details. In the entrance hall, the original front doorway to the porch has been blocked but the arch-headed fanlight with Y-tracery glazing bars remains. The stone open-well stair has cast iron balusters and a mahogany handrail, with a bold moulded plaster cornice round the stair hall. The early 20th century room alongside the north porch has a large carved stone chimneypiece and ornamental moulded plaster ceiling, both in a kind of Tudor/Jacobean style.