Blagdon House Including Service Block And Garden Walls

Blagdon House is a small farmhouse, now a house, dating from around 1800, with alterations made in the 1950s. It includes a rear service block and garden walls. The house is built of Flemish bond brick, rendered on the front elevation, with a gabled slate roof and end stacks with brick shafts. The service block is roughcast with a slate roof, while the garden walls are built of roughcast cob on stone rubble footings and have slate coping.

The house has a double-depth, two-room plan and a central entrance. The symmetrical front elevation has three bays and a cornice with moulded brackets. A central Tuscan timber doorcase features an open pediment and leads to a six-panel front door with panelled reveals and a fanlight decorated with a central roundel featuring a flower motif. The original windows consist of 2 ground floor and 3 first floor 16-pane sashes, except for a 12-pane sash in the centre of the first floor. Rendered curtain walls, approximately 3 metres high with slate coping, extend to the left and right of the front elevation, each incorporating a round-headed niche for garden seats; the left niche has been broken through by a doorway to the rear of the house while the right projects with conical slate roofs. Tall garden walls completely enclose the front garden, except for the boundary with Exhibition Road. The rear elevation has a round-headed stair window with glazing bars and margin panes. Two first-floor rear windows date from the 19th century and are 16-pane sashes; the ground floor windows are mostly 20th-century timber casements with high transoms.

The rear service block is two storeys high with a gable-ended roof and a stack at the west end. It includes a doorway, a pointed arched ground floor window with leaded panes and Y tracery, and pigeon holes under the eaves. A lofted building with a monopitch roof, formerly used as a milk collection point, adjoins the service block at the west end and contains a plain mid/late 19th-century fireplace with a bread oven and a removed loft floor.

The interior of the main house was altered in the 1950s but retains original joinery including shutters. The site of Blagdon is ancient, and the present building represents a good example of an early 19th-century gentleman's farmhouse.