Building record PSM 048 - Rise Farm

Rise Farm is typical of many local farmhouses in hiding a timber-framed behind a much later façade. The house presents an ostensibly late-Georgian frontage to the adjacent road, combining sash windows with a flat-pitched pantiled roof and a central entrance, although the asymmetry of this arrangement hints at earlier origins. The 19th century remodelling was designed only to impress the casual passer-by, as the tell-tale jetty and stair tower of the 16th and 17th centuries were left unaltered to the side elevations. Less typical however is the nature of the timber frame within, part of which is entirely inconsistent with this relatively isolated rural location and appears to have been moved from its original urban site and reconstructed here to form the basis of the existing house. The left-hand half of the property, when viewed from the road, is a rare and important example of a commercial building of the late-15th or early-16th century which probably began its life in the courtyard of a wealthy cloth merchant in the nearby town of Lavenham. Early-17th century documentary evidence for the dismantling and subsequent reconstruction of Lavenham buildings in the surrounding countryside is well known, but recognisable examples are very few. The secondary carpenter’s numerals of the jettied structure at Rise Farm combine, amongst other things, with its extraordinary array of arch-headed workshop windows to suggest an urban and commercial origin. The timber frame, redundant in poverty-stricken Lavenham, was apparently brought to its present position and converted for domestic purposes at the beginning of the 17th century. The storage area of the new farmhouse appears to survive from the medieval building on the site, while others parts of the timber-framed structure represent additions of the mid-17th century (S1).