Blandford Forum, Dorset

Mouthwatering

I make no excuse for returning to the Dorset town of Blandford Forum, which has featured in posts on this blog before. It's one of the best places to savour urban domestic buildings of the mid-18th century, and here is a particularly mouth-watering example. Lime Tree House was built in c. 1760 after the fire of 1731 that destroyed much of the town. The builders were John and William Bastard, who were responsible for most of the town's 18th-century reconstruction, and they built the house for their five sisters. It's one of the more upmarket houses in the centre of Blandford and follows the pattern of the town's houses designed for the professional and merchant classes – a room with two sash windows on either side of a central front door, fireplaces in the end walls, and a fairly narrow plan with a single roof and dormer windows. These houses usually have an ornate doorway and the doorway of Lime Tree House, with its curving canopy and Tuscan pilasters, is one of the building's outstanding features. Another eye-catching thing about this house is the delightful mottled purple and red brickwork. Blandford's brickwork is one of the best things about the town, but the lovely mixture of shades in the bricks of this house is particularly good.

Lime Tree House is home to the Blandford Fashion Museum. For more information, go here.

Lacock, Wiltshire

Looking up in Lacock

You probably know Lacock. It's the Wiltshire village that's wholly owned by the National Trust and preserved as a perfect prospect of limestone and timber framing. The village centre, with its range of houses from medieval to 19th century, its stone barn, its medieval church, is almost too perfect. Take away the cars and it could almost be an English village of the early-19th century – and it has played just that role in various film and television adaptations of Jane Austen novels, including the famous 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. It has been in Harry Potter films and other movies too.

Faced with such picture-perfect villagescape, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. So here, up near the eaves of one house, are, if not trees, some leaves – or at least carvings of leaves. These odd carvings with leaves and spirals are actually capitals – they want to be on top of columns or pilasters, doing the architectural job that capitals usually do. But all they have beneath them is plain wall, as if the builder had a spare lot of capitals left over from some other job and someone said, "Oh well, let's stick them up here, then."

They are an unusual kind of capital too. Most of us are familiar with Ionic capitals, with their spiral volutes, but Ionic capitals have no leaves and their spirals are the other other way around. This "wrong way round spiral with added leaves" was made popular by the great Italian baroque architect Francesco Borromini and was copied by various builders in England. I've noticed these Borromini capitals before at Blandford Forum in Dorset, where the local builder, the splendidly named John Bastard, used them more conventionally, at the tops of pilasters. But if Borromini capitals raised an eyebrow in Blandford Forum, here on the top of house at Lacock they are a real source of surprise.