Indio House

Indio House is a large house built in 1850 for Charles Aldenburg Bentinck, designed by the Exeter architect David Mackintosh. It stands on the east side of Newton Road in Bovey Tracey.

The building is constructed of squared rubble, probably Devonian limestone, with squared granite quoins. Doorways and windows are dressed with oolitic limestone, probably Bath stone. The roofs are slated with blue glazed ridge-tiles. Tall, crenellated chimneystacks of similar materials are placed to create a romantic effect.

The house is designed in an austere Tudor style and remains virtually unaltered externally. It is two storeys with a garret, arranged on a double-depth plan with asymmetrically placed projections. The main south-west front is five windows wide. Windows are generally mullioned and transomed with flat heads and no hood-moulds. A two-storey gabled entrance-porch occupies the centre bay, with both inner and outer doorways featuring two-centred arches and deep Perpendicular mouldings. The outer arch has quatrefoils in the spandrels and a hood-mould, above which is a stone plaque carved with the date 1850, the initials CAB, a heraldic emblem, and the motto CRAIGNEZ HONTE. The second storey of the porch contains a three-light mullioned-and-transomed window with a square sunk panel above carved with a cross in low relief. At each end of the front is a gabled projection one window wide, the right-hand example given considerably greater emphasis. To the right of the porch on the second storey is a tall staircase window of four mullioned-and-transomed lights. All three gables have moulded copings, kneelers, and carved apexes. Windows contain small square panes, except the right-hand ground storey window, which has three large panes in each of its lower lights, and the second-storey window to the left of the porch, which has small square panes with margins of quarter-panes.

Attached to the north-west end is a lower building resembling a chapel but identified in the architect's plan as a laundry. This building has a bell-turret and bell on its south-west gable. About three metres to the north-west is a small detached building in similar style, said to have been used as a butchery.

The interiors are remarkably well-preserved, at least on the south-eastern side of the house. The north-west front room on the ground storey is said to have a moulded plaster ceiling with the date 1850.

David Mackintosh, who died in 1859 aged 42, was an Exeter architect apparently specialising mainly in church building and restoration, though in 1859 he was commissioned to build a mansion at Sandridge Park, Wiltshire.

An earlier house at Indio existed for John Southcote, who obtained a perpetual lease of the property from St. John's Hospital, Bridgwater, in 1531. No trace of this house appears to remain, except possibly some columns in the garden.