65, High Street

House and shop at 65 High Street, Barnstaple, dating from the late 17th century with an altered front of the late 19th or early 20th century. The front block is probably older than the principal dating.

The building consists of two separate blocks—front and back—each one room wide and separated by a courtyard. The front block is three storeys with a garret and two rooms deep with a central staircase. The back block is two storeys with a garret and one room deep with a rear staircase. The blocks were never connected by a first-floor gallery.

The walls, where exposed on the front and left side of the back block and in the rear part of the left side of the front block, are of plastered red brick in Flemish bond on a high stone rubble plinth. The rear wall of the front block has been rebuilt in late 20th-century brick. The front elevation to the street is stuccoed. Both blocks have slated roofs hipped at the front. The rear part of the front block's roof has been demolished and replaced by a 20th-century flat roof. A late 18th or early 19th-century red brick chimney with projecting courses forming a cap stands on the left side wall of the front block. The back block has a similar chimney at the front end of its left side wall.

The ground storey has been gutted and now forms one deep room extending to the rear staircase, with the courtyard glazed over. The front elevation is one window wide. The ground and second storeys have a tall round-arched opening with moulded architrave and keystone, containing shop windows reconstructed since about 1927. Above the arch is an unsupported entablature with enriched cornice and guttae. The third storey has a single casement window with moulded architrave and an ornate cast-iron balcony in front. A bracketed eaves cornice and parapet complete the facade. Earlier brickwork at the rear has a raised band at first-floor level. The back block has two box-framed, six-pane sashes in the front wall of the upper storey and one in each side wall. The left side wall has an additional original mullioned-and-transomed wood casement window with transom set high up.

Interior details include a rear ground-floor fireplace in the front block with a plain wood lintel and lining of compacted red brick dust with incised lines imitating brick courses. Upper floors feature a geometrical wood staircase with thin square-section balusters. The first floor has a good 19th-century cast-iron grate in the rear room and two-panelled doors with applied bolection mouldings. The second floor has fireplaces with early 18th-century moulded wood surrounds and 19th-century cast-iron grates. Behind the surround of the front room fireplace is an ovolo-moulded wood lintel with run-out stops, with the interior and outer faces of the opening covered with white and yellow plaster, the yellow bearing faint traces of a pattern. The rear wall of the room contains a truss from an earlier and lower roof with moulded butt purlins and ridge. Trenched collars are held by nail and peg at each end, the main section between the principals cut away. Hip rafters, which appear original, are nailed. Trusses have notched apexes and gouged carpenter's marks. In the roof space are visible a stone chimney breast on the right-hand side and a brick one on the left-hand side.

The back block has a large fireplace in the left side of the ground storey with plain brick jambs and plain wood lintel, with a brick chimney breast in approximate English bond. Remains of a panelled room to the rear of the fireplace survive with bolection-moulded panelling in two heights on the left and rear walls and a box-cornice. An early 18th-century cupboard with round-arched double doors has been inserted on the left side. Evidence of a former passage exists on the right-hand side of the room. At the rear is a tight, early or mid 19th-century wooden geometrical stair with shaped step-ends and thin square-section balusters. The roof structure, dating to the 18th or early 19th century, has principal rafters crossing at the apex to hold the ridge, with lightly trenched purlins and no collar.

This is one of the two best of the Barnstaple houses with detached back blocks, which themselves represent a rare English urban plan type. The roof of the front block is of considerable local interest.