Home Farm Cottage

Details

TL 08 NE
1743/9/10014

ASHTON
ASHTON WOLD
Home Farm Cottage

(Formerly listed as: ASHTON WOLD, HOME FARM, COWMAN'S COTTAGE)

13-NOV-98

GV
II*
House, forming the dwelling of a model farmstead 1900-01. By William Huckvale, architect, for Charles Rothschild, in a Vernacular Revival style.

MATERIALS: Coursed rock-faced limestone with ashlar limestone dressings, a half-hipped roof with a reed thatch covering and ridge chimneys.

PLAN: Double depth plan with integral verandahs to the front and rear elevations.

EXTERIOR: The building is of single storey and attic form. The principal west elevation has a wide central eyebrow dormer above the deep eaves overhang carried on the braced arcade posts of the front verandah. The verandah covers a paved walkway, a pair of doorways at the south end, an entrance doorway to the right of centre and a two-light mullioned window. The rear elevation is similarly detailed, but has two eyebrow dormers, each with a three-light mullioned window. There is a central doorway flanked by a three-light and a four-light mullioned window.

INTERIOR: The interior is little altered and retains its original plan. The fireplace to the principal reception room is a late C20 addition, and the kitchen now has late C20 fittings. The other rooms of the house retain original joinery fixtures and fittings, including hearth surrounds and a stick baluster winder stair.

HISTORY: Home Farm Cottage, the nearby Old Dairy, cartshed and the farmbuildings, form an important component of the new estate developed by Lord Rothschild at the behest of his son, Nathaniel Charles, and designed by the architect William Huckvale (1847-1936). Huckvale was required to design not only a house, but also an entire complement of estate buildings. The Rothschilds also became the first landowners in the country to provide their tenants with the luxury of both running filtered water and electricity, the latter generated by turbines housed in a former water mill below the village on the River Nene, from where water was pumped to a water tower and so to the estate buildings. Each cottage had a bath house and was placed in a large garden planted with a lilac, a laburnum and fruit trees. Huckvale worked mainly for the Rothschilds and designed a number of buildings for their Tring Park and Aston Clinton estates. The quality of his work is reflected in the 42 listed buildings he already has to his name, 13 in Tring and 29 on the Ashton Estate. Home Farm Cottage, The Old Dairy, cartshed, and the farmbuildings, formed a showpiece ensemble - a fusion of ferme ornee and model farm sited in the picturesque setting of a woodland clearing. The farmstead, of which Home Farm Cottage formed the dwelling house, has long since ceased to function as a working unit, and the Old Dairy and the farm buildings are now used mostly for storage purposes.

SOURCES:
Map accompanying Conveyance of Ashton Estate to Lionel Rothschild (1860), Northamptonshire Record Office 5173.
Map of Ashton Wold (c1901), in Ashton Wold House.
Ordnance Survey maps 1886, 1900, 1926.
Rothschild, Miriam, The Rothschild Gardens (1996), 82-107 & 169.
'The Hon. Nathaniel Rothschild', obituary in The Times, 15 October 1923.
S. Wade-Martin, The English Model Farm, 2002

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION
Home Farm Cottage at Home Farm, Ashton is designated at Grade II* for the following principal reasons:

* ARCHITECTURE: It is of exceptional architectural interest for the high quality of its design which reflects the vernacular building traditions of the region, and for the level of craftmanship evident in the working of the materials chosen for its construction.

* HISTORY: Home Farm Cottage is of enhanced historic interest as a key element of Home Farm model farmstead, part of a newly-created model estate developed by the internationally significant Rothschild family during a period of agricultural depression which had signalled the end of farmstead development elsewhere in England.

* COMPLETENESS: Home Farm Cottage is exceptionally complete, having suffered little external alteration, no changes in building materials, no extension, having retained much of the original internal plan and with little significant change to its woodland clearing setting.

* GROUP VALUE: Home Farm Cottage has high group significance as part of the model farm complex at Home Farm, the buildings of which share a common architectural vocabulary and the same palette of building materials as the farm buildings, the Old Dairy and Cartshed, which were all designed for the Rothschild family by the architect William Huckvale.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

471658

Legacy System:

LBS

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