Exleigh House

Exleigh House, Leat Street, Tiverton

House, built around 1820 by John Heathcoat for himself. At the time of survey it had been used as offices and was empty and in poor condition. The building is rendered with some local stone rubble exposed where render has fallen away. It has a slate roof with lead rolls, brick stacks with rendered shafts featuring sunk panels and some original chimneypots, and cast-iron rainwater goods.

The house follows a double-depth plan with a central entrance into a hall, from which the stair rises axially to the rear of the hall beneath a top-lit stairwell. A basement contains the kitchen and service rooms with a back stair. The attic has been used for accommodation. Additional service rooms and possible stabling to the rear are screened off by a stone rubble wall.

The exterior presents two storeys over a basement with an attic storey. The symmetrical five-bay front features deep boxed eaves on shaped brackets and a hipped roof built around a central valley with a glazed dome for the stairwell. Steps lead up to a porch with unusual cast-iron paired Ionic columns supporting an entablature and cornice. The sides of the porch have been infilled with late 19th or 20th century two-pane sash windows, and the two-leaf half-glazed porch door with overlight and side lights is also secondary.

The ground floor has 12-pane hornless timber sashes with timber hoods moulded for blinds, which no longer exist. First-floor windows are also 12-pane sashes except the centre window, which is tripartite: a 12-pane sash in the centre flanked by two-over-two-pane sashes in the outer lights. The attic features gabled dormers with slate-hung sides and pedimented gables, glazed with two-light casements of three panes per light.

The right return facing the River Exe has channelled rustication at basement level and is three bays wide, featuring a central round-headed niche and a secondary doorway to the rear with steps and a six-fielded-panel door with an overlight. Windows are 12-pane hornless sashes. The left return is similar but the basement is exposed, with one louvred and one glazed window and a former doorway in the centre bay.

The four-window rear elevation is partly obscured at ground-floor level by the screen wall to the projecting rear service rooms. On the first floor, the outer windows are 12-pane sashes and the inner windows are nine-over-six panes. Two small timber boxes of unknown function are fixed to the external wall with doorways that could be opened from the windows. The stone rubble rear screen wall is pilastered with two windows, a bull's-eye opening, a doorway leading to the kitchen, and a garage door knocked into one end.

Inside, the house is very complete, although most chimneypieces are missing. It retains good plaster cornices, six-panel doors with planted mouldings, one white marble chimneypiece, and shutters. A particularly fine staircase features a cast-iron balustrade of decorated panels. A narrow room behind the ground-floor right front room has had part of its wall removed and supported on cast-iron columns.

John Heathcoat (1783-1861) was a major influence on Tiverton in the 19th century. He moved to Tiverton from Nottingham around 1816, transferring his lace manufactory which had been attacked by Luddites in Nottingham. By the 1860s the West Exe factory in Tiverton employed more than twenty percent of the town's population. Heathcoat developed the West Exe area with housing and is a nationally important figure in the history of industrial housing and workers' welfare. He also built the first factory school in Devon, at the gates of the factory. His grandson built Knightshayes.

The house is sited close to the River Exe with the parish church standing high above it on the opposite bank. It is now accessible only through the Heathcoat factory complex which has been developed around it, and its garden and immediate historic environment have been altered. Exleigh House is a good example of a Georgian villa with some unusual features, notably the cast-iron columns to the porch, and is historically important as Heathcoat's house, sited close to the factory and the West Exe development.