Home Farm, The Old Dairy

Home Farm, The Old Dairy

Former dairy built in 1900–01 by architect William Huckvale for Charles Rothschild. The building is executed in Vernacular Revival style.

The structure is constructed from coursed rock-faced limestone, occasionally snecked, with ashlar limestone dressings. It features a single stone end wall chimney stack and is roofed with thatch covering a curving hipped roof with a deep eaves overhang.

The dairy follows a three room plan with a cross passage separating the west end dairy and service rooms to the east. It is a single storey building with three false eyebrow dormers to the roof at the west end. The north front has an off-centre doorway set within an arcaded verandah which extends around the west end of the building to an opposite doorway on the south elevation, sheltering a raised flagged walkway with stone kerbs. The timber arcade posts stand on padstones and have short angle braces to the wall plates they support. To the left of the front doorway is an advanced bay containing a three-light chamfer mullioned window with a flush, eared surround keyed into the surrounding masonry. The window has leaded lights set into iron casement frames. The west end is canted and has three three-light chamfer mullioned windows, whilst the east end is flat and has a two-light window to the north side and a boarded hatch door to the south.

The interior dairy is octagonal on plan and has blue wall tiles with a decorative tile frieze set below a moulded plaster cornice. The decorative ribbed open ceiling extends upwards to an elaborate central ventilator. Marble benches are supported by shaped marble brackets set upon marble floor tiles. The window openings have panelled reveals. The cross passage has a tiled floor, half glazed front and rear doors and white tiled walls, with full height cupboards with panelled doors. The room to the east side of the passage has tiled walls and a sink, with a four panel door in its rear wall leading to a service room beyond.

The Home Farm buildings form an important component of the new estate developed by Lord Rothschild at the behest of his son, Nathaniel Charles, with architect William Huckvale (1847–1936) required to design not only a house but an entire complement of estate buildings. The Rothschilds became 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, from where water was pumped to a water tower and so to the estate buildings. Each cottage had a bath house and was placed in a large garden planted with lilac, laburnum and fruit trees. Huckvale worked mainly for the Rothschilds and designed a number of 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. The Old Dairy, Farm Buildings, Cartshed and Cowman's Cottage formed a showpiece ensemble—a fusion of ferme ornée and model farm sited in the picturesque setting of a woodland clearing. It has long since ceased to function as a working unit, and the Old Dairy and Farm Buildings are now used mostly for storage purposes.