Wrinklehorn

This is a house dating to around 1830. It is constructed of rendered walls with a slate-hung first floor, and has a hipped Welsh slate roof with rendered brick end stacks. The windows appear to be from the 19th century.

The house is a double-depth villa with a 19th-century extension to the north. It is oriented to face north-east and features an unusual five-bay south-west front facing the garden.

The north-east elevation has a wide, square-headed doorway with a patterned fanlight and a panelled door. A verandah wraps around the south-east and south-west fronts, supported by slender cast iron columns that carry an overhanging first floor, which is slate-hung. A first-floor verandah is located between two projecting wing bays on the south-west front. The windows have distinctive Chinese-style Gothick glazing patterns, reflecting the late 18th-century fashion for Chinoiserie. Round-arched French windows with shutters are on the ground floor. Small windows are set into the canted sides of the first-floor wing bays.

Originally named after its elevated location above the River Dart, Wrinklehorn (formerly known as Mount Dart) was built in Bridgetown, to the east of Totnes. The area was under the ownership of the Duke of Somerset in the 19th century, who built a Free Church in 1835 to serve the growing local population. By the late 19th century, a number of large detached villas had been constructed in Bridgetown. Wrinklehorn is a modestly proportioned early 19th-century villa, depicted on Ordnance Survey Maps from 1889, 1905, and 1932, with a now-demolished cottage formerly known as Wrinklehorn Cottage situated nearby to the east.

The house is designated at Grade II for being a good example of an architecturally distinguished house of its period, with significant original details such as the cast-iron verandahs and Chinese-style Gothick glazing. It also contributes to the strong historic setting in substantial grounds overlooking the River Dart valley, and makes a notable contribution to the character of Bridgetown, providing evidence for the historical development of Totnes.