The Old Vicarage

Reasons for Designation

The Old Vicarage, built in 1906 by Frank Sidney Chesterton, is recommended for designation at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * Architectural interest: an accomplished work by a talented architect, displaying the Arts and Crafts movement's characteristic formal freedom and attention to detail and materials; * Intactness: the building is very little altered both within and without; * Group value: the former vicarage forms a group with JL Pearson's Grade II*-listed All Souls' Church.

Details

SUNNINGHILL

599-1/0/10016 ALL SOULS ROAD 19-MAR-10 The Old Vicarage

GV II Vicarage, now private house, 1906, by Frank Sidney Chesterton

MATERIALS: Orange-red brick, with much seasoned oak in window frames and mullions; roof of handmade clay tiles.

PLAN: L-plan - main block to south with reception rooms and bedrooms opening onto full-height stair hall; lower service wing projecting to north with kitchen, storerooms and bedroom above.

EXTERIOR: Arts and Crafts idiom - steeply-pitched roofs with sprocketed (upswept) eaves, tall corbelled chimney stacks and irregular fenestration comprising small rectangular leaded lights set in mullioned oak frames. West gable end has massive projecting stack with multiple offsets; main entrance to left has nine-panel oak door recessed in round-arched opening with multiple orders. Tall inverted L-shaped stair window to north with small hipped dormer and cruciform ridge stack above; projecting to left is lower service wing with low-eaved hipped roof and very tall stack. More formal south front has three large mullion-and-transom windows lighting principal ground-floor rooms, and three gabled half-dormers to bedrooms above.

Modern garage and carport to north of service wing are not of special interest.

INTERIORS: Little altered, with most rooms retaining original moulded cornices, skirting boards and six-panel doors set in moulded surrounds. Central stair-hall has large fireplace with panelled timber mantel; open-well staircase has heavy oak rail, turned balusters and square newels with ball finials. Large fireplaces with green tiled surrounds in dining room and sitting room, the former flanked by arched niches with part-glazed doors, the latter having a canted left-hand section incorporating a cupboard. Dining room ceiling has four floral sprays in moulded plaster. Drawing room has fireplace with panelled timber mantel and simple carved stone surround. Master bedroom on first floor has large tiled fireplace; other first- and second-floor rooms have smaller fireplaces with moulded timber surrounds. Service wing contains modern kitchen/dining room plus fuel store and outside WC.

HISTORY: The Church of All Souls, designed by JL Pearson, was built in 1896-7 to serve the expanding commuter population of South Ascot. The adjacent vicarage was built in 1906 to the designs of the architect FS Chesterton.

Frank Sidney Chesterton (1876-1916), a cousin of the writer GK Chesterton, was born into a prosperous family of property surveyors in Kensington, west London. He designed a number of houses, flats and business premises in the area during the early 1900s, including the palatial Hornton Court complex on Kensington High Street (where the family firm, now the estate agents Chesterton Humberts, still has its offices), and a row of more modest townhouses at 12-54 Hornton Street (Grade II). He also worked on a number of country-house restorations, and - with John Duke Coleridge - on houses at Norbury Manor in Streatham, London County Council's early cottage estates. Chesterton died of wounds sustained at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

SOURCES: A Stuart Gray, Edwardian Architecture: A Biographical Dictionary (1985), p.141-2. Simon Bradley and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Berkshire (revised edn., forthcoming).

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The Old Vicarage, built in 1906 by Frank Sidney Chesterton, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * Architectural interest: an accomplished work by a talented architect, displaying the Arts and Crafts movement's characteristic formal freedom and attention to detail and materials; * Intactness: the building is very little altered both within and without; * Group value: the former vicarage forms a group with JL Pearson's Grade II*-listed All Souls' Church.

Legacy

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

Legacy System number:

507658

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Books and journals
Gray, A S, Edwardian Architecture A Biographical Dictionary, (1985), 141-142

End of official list entry

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