Smallacombe Farmhouse

SX 38 NE 2/122

LIFTON Smallacombe Farmhouse

14.6.52

GV II* Farmhouse. Circa late C16 origins, remodelled and turned round circa early C18. Stone rubble with some brick dressings, wrongly described as a "brick building" by Pevsner. Slate roof gabled at ends, brick cornices. Gable ends slate hung.

The west-facing C16 house was rebuilt in the early C18 with an east entrance front. One C16 doorway survives at the rear and a lean-to adjoining the south end with a C16 doorway and two mullioned windows may be the remains of a south cross wing. Nothing of the earlier house appears to survive above ground floor level.

The main block of the C18 range has rear outshuts to either side of a two-storey projection with a roof hipped to the rear, this may have been the early C18 stair projection although it is now ceiled over at first floor level. Two storeys. Three window symmetrical east front with a central two-leaf panelled door under a flat porch canopy carried on granite columns, porch probably C20. Two ground floor thirty-six pane sashes with crown glass may be early C19 replacements.

Three narrow first floor eighteen-pane sashes, the central sash boxed. Two two-light granite mullioned windows to south end of south lean-to have timber casements and iron stanchions. Hollow-chamfered arched granite doorway with pyramid and ball stops on the west end of the lean-to. The ground was levelled up when the C18 house was erected leaving most of the old south cross wing below the ground level of the C18 building. The hipped rear projection has two C20 buttresses and a probably re-sited moulded granite arched doorway to the left with carved spandrels and a square-headed architrave.

Interior: the most remarkable feature of the house is a delightfully exuberant plaster ceiling to the first floor of the rear projection, probably dating from the first decade of the C18, with more or less free-hanging plaster figures in a design which may celebrate one of Marlborough's victories in the War of the Spanish Succession. A central winged figure in an oval moulding probably represents victory and carries a wreath in one hand and may originally have been blowing a trumpet. Cherubs' heads, wreaths and foliage, the leaves completely free-hanging, surround the oval. The ceiling is coved below the central design, two corners containing scallop shells with grotesque heads derived from green men and long trails of flowers and leaves. In the opposite corners are two plaster figures of grenadiers, one apparently in the act of lighting a grenade, surrounded by military trophies including cannon and breast plates. Some C20 repair after damage by a falling cat. Kathleen and Cecil French suggested that the ceiling was the work of "lesser local craftsman" imitating 1697 Dutch plasterwork at Bowringsleigh.

An C18 dog-leg stair has slim turned balusters, a flat moulded handrail and a timber lattice dog gate Two-panel doors, some with low middle rails.

Listing NGR: SX3719286161