Building record RGL 033 - Nine Elms Farmhouse

Nine Elms Farmhouse is a complete domestic building of circa 1620 that extends to 50 feet in length and would have been appropriate to a mid-ranking husbandman of that period. The house contains the usual tripartite layout on its ground floor, with a central hall 20 feet in length by 18 in width, flanked to its left by a service room and to the right by a brick chimney and parlour. A central doorway, now blocked, opened from the hall into the single service room, and there is evidence of a second blocked door against the rear wall which would have opened onto the original service stair. The upper storey was open to its clasped-purlin roof structure, which survives intact (complete with nailed wind-braces), and was divided into three chambers: the parlour and service chambers were separated only by the chimney, but the service chamber was fully partitioned and accessible only from the ground floor. The existing brick chimney contains good fireplaces in the hall, parlour and parlour chamber but does not fit the frame and is a replacement of the mid-17th century (its predecessor did not contain a fireplace on the first floor). The present lobby entrance may represent a modification of the same period, and the house may formerly have possessed a cross-passage (any definitive evidence is lost or obscured). Of particular interest is the differential studding of the timber frame, which emphasises the relative status of the parlour by providing its walls with more expensive, closely-spaced studs than those of the hall and other rooms of the house (its panels of wattle-and-daub are eight inches in width, as opposed to 12 inches in the hall and 16 inches on the upper storey). Plain ‘diamond’ window mullions survive in the rear wall, while the better rooms possessed shallow oriel windows that would have contained ovolo-moulded mullions, and both the external walls and the plain, tall-sectioned ceiling joists were probably rendered from the outset.

A single-storied bakehouse was built against its service gable in the mid-17th century, and a stair inserted in the original external wall to provide a link with the service chamber. This stair is of ‘solid-tread’ construction, and is one of the finest examples of its kind to survive in a domestic context (S1).