3, Duke Street

This is a three-storey merchant's house, dating back to 1639, and later used as the Steam Packet Inn, now serving as tea rooms with offices and flats above. It was built on land leased to Edward Spurway. The construction is mixed, featuring thick local stone rubble for the side walls and plastered timber framing for the front and back walls. A stone rubble stack is present, with a 19th-century brick chimney shaft on the right party wall, and the roof is slate.

The original plan was a single room, with no ground-floor fireplace, as it was always intended for use as a shop. A curved alcove at the rear of the left party wall indicates the former location of a newel stair and suggests a side passage once ran along that side. The ends of the stone side walls corbel out to support the jettied upper floors. Worn stone plaques are found at first-floor level; the right-hand plaque is believed to belong to the house and bears the date 1639 with the initials WB and ES.

The ground floor has a late 19th-century timber shop front, featuring three lights with overlights, flanked by recessed doorways with similar part-glazed doors and overlights with glazing bars. The underside of the first-floor bressummer is carved with a bead-and-reel design, a relatively early feature for the date of 1639. A canted bay window is present on the first floor, with a four-pane sash window, and similar sashes are found on the second floor and in the attic, with a narrower sash to the left. A gable above incorporates 19th-century open, wavy bargeboards and a timber apex finial and pendant.

The interior is largely the result of 19th and 20th-century modernization. The ground floor has been cleared of partitions, and a rear wall has been removed to connect with numbers 1 Duke Street and 12 The Quay. It is thought that 17th-century carpentry and other original features may survive behind the later plasterwork.

The house is one of a group of merchants’ houses built on reclaimed land as part of a Town Corporation scheme to expand port facilities, beginning in 1585. By the 1630s, this area was the most fashionable part of town, and the surviving 17th-century houses represent some of the finest merchants’ houses of their period in Devon.