Zinch House

Zinch House is a farmhouse dating back to the 16th century, with alterations in the 17th, 18th, and late 19th centuries. The exterior is roughcast over rubble, with decorative scalloped clay tiles, decorative ridge tiles, overhanging eaves, sprockets, decorative bargeboards to the gable ends, brick stacks on the gable ends and beside the cross passage, and a brick stack that is seemingly decorative. The original plan may have been an open hall house, later ceiled to create a 3-cell house with a cross passage and a stair turret beside the back cross passage entrance, which is now the front entrance. A section of the end wall was rebuilt, and the house now comprises 2 cells and a cross passage with a storeroom beyond. An 18th-century service wing was added, and a bay window was inserted in the late 19th or early 20th century. The two-storey, four-bay facade features 19th-century casement windows, two to the left of a gabled stairlight window with marginal glazing bars and decorative bargeboards, one to the right, and a ground-floor window to the left of a raking buttress beside the entrance. There is a two- and three-panelled door within a tiled porch supported by a wooden column set into the angle with the stair turret, a single-storey, gabled bay window projecting beyond, a glazed opening to the left, and a small opening to the right of a plank door leading to the store. The right return gable end has a casement window, with a brick stack above. Inside, the kitchen to the left of the cross passage has a lateral chamfered beam with enriched stops and chamfered stone jambs to the open fireplace—it is thought this fireplace contained a curing chamber. To the right of the cross passage is a 6-panel compartment ceiling with a chamfered lintel over the cross passage fireplace and chamfered stone jambs with diamond stops. A two stud screen on the opposite wall has large empty panels and an arched door frame set back approximately 250mm from the moulded beam. An adjoining room is believed to have been rebuilt. A jointed cruck truss on the first floor rises from this room, but has been altered by the insertion of a bay window. A peaked doorframe from the head of the stairs is now set in a corridor on the first floor. The timber frame partition resembles one at Lower Combe, Pitminster, as documented in a 1980 report on Rexton Farm Cottages. It is possible that a first-floor room was originally jettied out over the open hall from the now-rebuilt end wall, accounting for the gap between the partition and the compartment ceiling.