Home Farm, the Old Dairy

Details

ASHTON

TL 08 NE ASHTON WOLD 1743/9/10013 Home Farm, The Old Dairy 13-NOV-98 (Formerly listed as: ASHTON WOLD HOME FARM, THE OLD DAIRY)

II* Former Dairy. 1900-01. By William Huckvale, architect, for Charles Rothschild. Vernacular Revival style. MATERIALS: Coursed rock-faced limestone, occasionally snecked, with ashlar limestone dressings, a single stone end wall chimney stack and a thatch covering to a curving hipped roof with a deep eaves overhang. PLAN: Three room plan with a cross passage separating the west end dairy and the service rooms to the east.

EXTERIOR: The dairy is a single storey building, with three false eyebrow dormers to the roof at the west end. The north front has an off-centre doorway set within an arcaded verandah which extends around the west end of the building to the opposite doorway on the south elevation, sheltering a raised flagged walkway with stone kerbs. The timber arcade posts stand on padstones, and have short angle braces to the wall plates they support. To the left of the front doorway is an advanced bay with a three-light chamfer mullioned window with a flush, eared surround keyed into the surrounding masonry. The window has leaded lights set into iron casement frames. The west end is canted and has three, three-light chamfer mullioned windows, whilst the east end is flat and has a two-light window to the north side and a boarded hatch door to the south.

INTERIOR: The dairy is octagonal on plan and has blue wall tiles with a decorative tile frieze set below a moulded plaster cornice. The decorative ribbed open ceiling extends upwards to an elaborate central ventilator. There are marble benches, supported by shaped marble brackets set upon marble floor tiles. The window openings have panelled reveals. The cross passage has a tiled floor, half glazed front and rear doors and white tiled walls. Within the passage are full height cupboards with panelled doors. The room to the east side of the passage has tiled walls and a sink, and a four panel door in its rear wall leads to a service room to the rear.

HISTORY: The Home Farm buildings 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. The Old Dairy, Farm Buildings, Cartshed and Cowman's Cottage formed a showpiece ensemble - a fusion of ferme ornee and model farm sited in the picturesque setting of a woodland clearing. It 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 The Old Dairy at Home Farm, Ashton is designated at Grade II* for the following principal reasons:

* ARCHITECTURE: As a component of the model farmstead at Home Farm, 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: As a component element of the Home Farm model farmstead, the Old Dairy is of enhanced historic interest as part of a key element 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: The Old Dairy is exceptionally complete, having suffered no external alteration, changes in building materials or extension, having retained much or the original internal plan and with little significant change to its woodland clearing setting.

* RARITY. The Old Dairy is an example of a detached farmstead dairy, a building type which is nationally rare.

* GROUP VALUE: The Old Dairy 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, and 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:

471657

Legacy System:

LBS

End of official list entry

All text content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 , except where otherwise stated. Any supplied maps are © Crown Copyright [and database rights] 2026 OS AC0000815036 and may not be reproduced without permission.