Home Farm Cottage

Home Farm Cottage is a house built in 1900-01 as the dwelling of a model farmstead at Ashton Wold. It was designed by architect William Huckvale for Charles Rothschild in a Vernacular Revival style.

The building is constructed of coursed rock-faced limestone with ashlar limestone dressings. It has a half-hipped roof covered in reed thatch with ridge chimneys. The house is of single storey and attic form with a double depth plan and integral verandahs to both front and rear elevations.

The principal west elevation features a wide central eyebrow dormer above deep eaves, which overhang and are carried on braced arcade posts of the front verandah. The verandah covers a paved walkway and contains a pair of doorways at the south end, an entrance doorway to the right of centre, and a two-light mullioned window. The rear elevation is similarly detailed but has two eyebrow dormers, each with a three-light mullioned window, and a central doorway flanked by a three-light and a four-light mullioned window.

The interior is largely unaltered and retains its original plan. The other rooms retain original joinery fixtures and fittings, including hearth surrounds and a stick baluster winder stair. The fireplace to the principal reception room is a late twentieth-century addition, as are the kitchen fittings.

Home Farm Cottage formed part of an important model estate developed by Lord Rothschild at the behest of his son, Nathaniel Charles. William Huckvale (1847-1936), the architect, designed not only the cottage but the entire complement of estate buildings. The Rothschilds were the first landowners in the country to provide their tenants with both running filtered water and electricity, the latter generated by turbines housed in a former water mill below the village on the River Nene. Water was pumped to a water tower and distributed to the estate buildings. Each cottage included a bath house and was set in a large garden planted with a lilac, a laburnum and fruit trees. Huckvale worked predominantly for the Rothschilds and designed numerous buildings for their Tring Park and Aston Clinton estates. He has 42 listed buildings to his name, including 13 at Tring and 29 on the Ashton Estate. Home Farm Cottage, together with the Old Dairy, cartshed and farmbuildings, formed a showpiece ensemble combining ferme ornée and model farm principles in a picturesque woodland clearing. The farmstead ceased functioning as a working unit long ago, with the Old Dairy and farm buildings now used mostly for storage.