Chaddesley Corbett, Worcestershire

Polite but pragmatic

The buildings that attract me are sometimes the ones that don’t quite obey all the rules. Here, for example, is an example of an early-18th century house with many of the standard features of Georgian domestic architecture: sash windows, symmetrically arranged, brickwork with stone quoins, keystones and sills, a canopy over the door supported on scrolled brackets. The central ‘blind’ window may have been blocked at some point in its history or may simply have always been like that – blind windows are not unusual in this kind of architecture, because they look more interesting than blank stretches of wall and keep up the rhythm of rectangles across the facade.

What’s not quite from the pattern-book of ‘polite’ 18th-century architecture is the roof line and the ‘extra’ upper window. More standard would be a very low-pitched roof hidden behind a parapet, the whole facade ending roughly at the level of the top of the quoins. However, here a higher-pitched roof leaves attic space beneath, and the attic is lit by the central window. This lonely sash window, with an expanse of blank brickwork and sloping parapets on either side, looks odd, but fulfils a practical purpose – the extra accommodation squeezed into the roof space.

The side elevation displays another oddity – the lintel of another doorway, subsequently blocked, is visible between the ground-floor windows. The removal of the doorway is clearly an alteration – and whether the surviving lintel looks awkward or charming is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I like it, for its charm and for the way it reveals a stage in the building’s history. The whole house, I think, is a pleasant-looking building, with a seasoning of quirkiness that makes it, to this viewer at least, all the more appetising.