Matthews Cottage And Rose Cottage

Pair of houses on Midhurst Road in Rogate, probably built in the late 15th or early 16th century with later additions. The listing covers Rose Cottage and Matthew's Cottage; Newey's Cottage, added to the eastern end of Rose Cottage around 1900, is not included.

The original structure comprises a timber-framed building with brick and plaster infill, later refaced in stone and brick. Both cottages are one and a half storeys tall with clay-tiled roofs. The main south front shows this mixed treatment: rubble stone facing dominates, with one section brick-faced and another rendered with incised lines to resemble ashlar joints. The ground floor has a series of small segment-headed windows with paired 4- and 6-light casements. First-floor dormers have paired 4-light casements, with catslide roofs to the right and gabled dormers to the left. At the rear, the timber frame is exposed, showing irregular box framing with curved braces and mixed brick and plaster infill. The roof is hipped with a small gablet at its eastern end. Matthew's Cottage's western half is taller and built wholly of brick, clearly a later extension probably originally forming a separate dwelling. Rose Cottage has a modern single-storey rear extension. Brick ridge stacks run in the lobby-entry position, with a pair of stacks on the party wall between the two cottages.

Rose Cottage now has a lobby-entry plan, possibly imposed on an older open-hall arrangement. The four-bay layout contains a short hearth-bay with the entrance lobby to its south, separating the western and central ground-floor rooms. To the east is a bay with stairs and a short dogleg corridor leading to a third room. Stairs ascend to a first-floor hallway with two principal bedrooms in the end bays and two smaller bedrooms between.

The ground-floor interior comprises three principal rooms on either side of a large brick hearth aligned with the entrance lobby, and a third room to the east where a smaller hearth projects from the end wall. Ceiling beams and joists are exposed throughout, as are wall framing elements including a massive central post in the western end wall. A blocked doorway to the left of this post once connected into what is now Matthew's Cottage. A narrow rear staircase leads to a corridor connecting the four first-floor rooms. The wall dividing the two eastern rooms retains remains of what appears to be a mullioned window, suggesting the easternmost bay may be a later addition. Truncated curved timbers in the middle two bays indicate these trusses were originally arch-braced, possibly evidence of an earlier open-hall plan. A narrow access shaft opens into the roof space, revealing rafters pegged together and surmounted by a ridge piece.

The core structure, comprising the eastern bay of Matthew's Cottage and the western three bays of Rose Cottage (the eastern bay may be slightly later), was probably built as a single timber-framed house in the late 15th or early 16th century, later refronted piecemeal in brick and stone. The main hearth was probably inserted later into what may previously have been an open hall. Most likely in the 19th century, Matthew's Cottage was extended westward to form a separate house. A single-storey extension was added to the rear of Rose Cottage in the late 20th century.