Building record KSY 037 - Wickerstreet House

2016: Wickerstreet House was known as Hollies Farm until the 1960s and formerly adjoined the western edge of a medieval green which still survives in its front garden. An early photograph shows a rendered façade with sash windows rather than its present exposed framing, which dates from a Mock Tudor refurbishment of the mid-20th century. The house is of special historic interest due to its unusually complex evolution between the mid-16th and early-17th centuries. It neatly illustrates the dramatic change in English housing during this period, and the manner in which a relatively modest Tudor building with a standard three cell layout and a single fireplace could be transformed in one lifetime into a sophisticated Yeoman farmhouse with multiple fireplaces. The 16th century house consisted of a central hall with a pair of storage rooms on the left and a small parlour on the right, all beneath a single roof with hipped gables. Its intact clasped-purlin roof is on the right, all beneath a single roof with hipped gables. Its intact clasped-purlin roof is unusual in its lack of wind bracing. The Tudor chimney adjoined the cross-passage, but was removed at the beginning of the 17th century when a large new stack with back to back fireplaces was inserted at the opposite end of the hall, almost completely filling the original parlour. A new parlour cross-wing was built to replace it with an ovolo-moulded ceiling and a projecting front bay which has since been removed. An additional parlour wing was added to the rear, and a large two-bay extension built against the original left-hand gable effectively doubling the size of the house. The outer bay of the left-hand extension was later demolished and replaced by an external chimney, and in the mid-19th century a two-storied red-brick lean-to was added alongside the rear parlour to form the modern kitchen (S1).