Rix

Rix is a planned model farm dating from around 1850, located in Tiverton. It comprises a farmhouse with attached farm buildings arranged around two courtyards—a house court with a good cobbled yard and a separate farmyard.

The complex includes a workers' shelter, service kitchen, threshing barn with a later horse-engine house, cider house, killing house, linhays and stables. Materials consist of stucco, rubble and rendered brick. The house has dry slate roofs with shaped and pierced barge boards, while some farm buildings are roofed with corrugated iron. Stacks are rendered with old clay pots.

The T-plan farmhouse is two storeys plus attics in a late Picturesque tradition, with a symmetrical 3-bay front featuring a central attic gable. The house front looks away from the courtyard. Original casement windows with glazing bars (some with margin panes) feature throughout; the service and farm buildings have cast-iron casements with latticed panes. A 1:2-window range on the right-hand return includes a 3-bay verandah to the ground floor at the wing, carried on cast-iron columns with clusters of three shafts per column.

The linked service wings occupy the right-hand corner behind the house. The courtyard front of the single-storey shelter link is carried on similar cast-iron columns. A deep plan range under one roof contains, from front to rear: a farm kitchen with loft, stabling and carriage house with loft, the main house entrance carriageway with a carriage porch on its left, the full-height threshing barn, and the farm carriage entrance. To the left of the barn beyond the threshing floor stands the later horse-engine house with a collar-truss roof of lower pitch.

The right-hand range of the farmyard contains a killing house with loft, a cider house with loft and porch, and a single-storey presumed stable block projecting beyond the rear. Front and rear linhay ranges border the farmyard, with a short range to its rear.

Porches at the house court entrance and cider house have gables with pierced barge boards and elliptically-arched doorways. A similar gable appears above the killing house. The house court entrance retains its original pair of braced and vertical-panel doors with ramped top rails. Doors to the house court are original planked doors divided into vertical panels. The barn doors are ledged and braced with pairs of ventilator slits flanking the doorways. Stables have a symmetrical 2-window front with 2-light casements and a wide central planked doorway.

Original queen-post roofs survive in the original parts of the link building and barn. The cider house contains evidence of former machinery in its floor structure and has a flight of steps up to the loft from the porch.

Rix is a very good example of a planned farmstead with fine attention to detail, including the carriage entrance doors and latticed windows of the service and farm buildings.