36, Stapledon Lane

No. 36 Stapledon Lane is a house dating from the early to mid-17th century, located in Ashburton. It features solid roughcast walls, which are said to be made of cob, and an asbestos-tiled roof. The house has a large rendered chimney with a tapered cap on each gable end. Its symmetrical layout consists of two rooms and a through passage, originally with a newel stair in each gable wall, although the right-hand stair was removed in the 20th century, leaving the curved wall visible. The left-hand room served as the hall or kitchen, while the parlour is to the right.

The house is two storeys high, with the ground floor having four windows and a central doorway, while the upper storey has two windows positioned close to the centre. The door is a late 20th-century plank design. The wood casements have either two lights or three lights in the upper-storey right-hand window, with each light containing three panes.

Inside, the passage is flanked on both sides by stud-and-panel screens with scratch-moulded studs. Each ground floor room features one full beam and one half beam, both chamfered with scroll-stops. The fireplaces in both rooms have ovolo-moulded wood lintels, although they have been underbuilt and their openings reduced in size; the left-hand fireplace is noted to have been wide originally with a deep interior. The upper floor also has fireplaces in both gables, with an ovolo-moulded lintel to the left and a lightly chamfered one to the right. There is a close-studded partition between the right-hand and middle upper floor rooms.

The house retains a complete set of four original roof trusses with threaded purlins and ridge, and mortice-and-tenoned ashlar posts, which bear gouged carpenter's marks. The three right-hand trusses feature cranked collars with shaped ends that are lap-jointed to the principals, while the left-hand truss has a wavy collar. The timbers are dark but not smoke-blackened. This house is considered an unusually good example of its type for Devon, particularly because it is situated in a town.