Timewell House

Timewell House

A house with origins in the early 16th century or earlier, remodelled in the 17th century and altered and extended in the early 19th century. The building is rendered stone with slate roofs, the 19th-century block behind a parapet, and rendered stacks.

The earliest part is a single-depth block, two-and-a-half rooms wide, later used as a service wing. The core of this block is a late medieval open hall house, probably floored over and remodelled in the late 16th century with a further 17th-century refurbishment. The full extent and plan form of this wing are not entirely clear and it may have been truncated in the early 19th century when an L-plan block was added, set forward from the wing at the right end. The L-plan block contains a central entrance into a stair hall, one large principal room to the right, and two smaller principal rooms to the left with a rear left wing with a hipped roof. A 20th-century lean-to kitchen has been added to the rear of the hipped wing.

The principal front elevation, of early 19th-century date, is two storeys with five windows originally arranged symmetrically, a moulded cornice and parapet, and a plat-band at first-floor level. A fine Bathstone porch has paired Doric columns to the front and paired pilasters to the rear. A two-leaf half-glazed front door is recessed below a segmental arch with a pretty semi-circular fanlight with glazing bars. Twelve-pane sash windows throughout except at ground floor right where two sashes have been replaced with a Ham Hill canted bay window, either late 19th or 20th century, with a 12-pane sash in the centre and 4-over-6-pane sashes in the outer lights. Sash windows appear on the left and right returns of the main block including two adjacent pairs of 12-pane sashes on the ground floor of the left return. The late medieval wing has a four-window elevation to the front with sash windows with glazing bars; a left-end stack and a 19th-century projecting lateral brick stack on the front.

The interior of the late medieval wing preserves interesting early 18th-century plasterwork on the ground floor with a decorated cornice and egg-and-dart decoration over some of the cross beams; other cross beams are 17th century with cyma reversa mouldings and scroll stops. The ground floor has a late 19th or 20th-century axial rear passage cutting through some of the decoration. A decayed moulded plaster cornice survives to the first-floor room. Four smoke-blackened medieval roof trusses remain below a later roof; three of the trusses are conventional early 16th-century collar-rafter trusses, but one truss (the second from the left) is closely spaced to the first from the left with a lower apex and has a yoke supporting a short post with a tenon at the top. This truss may be earlier than the others and suggests two phases to the open hall arrangement. The interior of the early 19th-century block has an open-well stair with a 20th-century replaced balustrade with heavy stick balusters and ramped wreathed handrail. Plaster cornices and early 19th-century joinery survive; the chimneypieces are introductions in an 18th-century style.