The White House, 92 Hepburn Gardens, St Andrews

The White House, 92 Hepburn Gardens, St Andrews

The White House dates from 1904 and was designed by the architectural practice Mills and Shepherd in the English Arts and Crafts style. It is a two-storey house of irregular L-plan form, built for William Norman Boase, a Dundee jute manufacturer who served as Provost of St Andrews from 1927 to 1936. The building is set back from the road, accessed by a private drive, and sits within a large garden overlooking Lade Braes Walk and Kinness Burn to the southeast.

The walls are harled and painted. The northwest elevation features a corner entrance sheltered by a tapered, open loggia. The northeast elevation displays a shallow, double-height canted bay window and a later mono-pitched addition. The southeast elevation has two protruding gables, two dormer windows breaking the eaves, and a multi-pane door opening onto the garden. Metal gutter support brackets are positioned below the eaves around most of the property.

Windows are predominantly one, two or three-light, multi-pane timber casements, many with transoms and mullions. The house has a mixture of pedimented and flat-roofed dormer windows. The steep gabled roof is slated, with four tall rendered chimneystacks topped with clay cans, predominantly offset along the roof ridge. Simple timber bargeboards, fascias and soffits complete the external detailing.

The interior retains original Arts and Crafts features including stained timber beams in the principal rooms, plain moulded cornicing, timber picture rails and panelled doors. A wide timber staircase, well-lit by a large window, features moulded timber balusters and handrail. Several fireplaces have plain stone surrounds with decorative timber mantelpieces.

The service area was extended to the northwest between 1911 and 1937. Architects' plans dated February 1904 show the original design included a hall, drawing room, dining room and purpose-built bicycle store near the front door, with extensive service accommodation in the northwest section comprising stores, coal room, laundry, scullery and servants' living accommodation upstairs. Plans drawn up in 1911 proposed a gun room, servants' hall, new coal store, additional servants' bedrooms and bathroom, and a loggia entrance with courtyard garden. These were not executed as designed. Instead, the laundry room was reconfigured and a sitting room added on the ground floor, with two bedrooms and a bathroom added to the first floor and a single-storey toilet extension to the northeastern service area, completed around 1937.

A detached flat-roofed double garage was added to the southwest sometime between 1967 and 1974 and is excluded from the listing. The entrance drive has circular gatepiers topped with domed coping stones, integrated into a sandstone rubble boundary wall with rounded cope.

Plans were drawn up in 1923 for a detached garage and living accommodation to the northwest of the house, closer to the main road. This building was constructed between 1938 and 1958 and is now a separate property known as The White Lodge.