Building record PRH 048 - Church Farmhouse, The Street

Church Farmhouse is a famously picturesque timber-framed and rendered building with a starred grade II listing that adjoins The Street in Parham approximately 120 m north-west of St Mary’s church. Its most conspicuous external feature is a fine oriel window bearing the heraldic arms of the Ufford Earls of Suffolk who were responsible for rebuilding the church at the end of the 14th century. This represents only one of many rare survivals and the property’s national importance derives chiefly from its exceptional painted decoration of circa 1700 – elements of which were published in Country Life in 1958. The building reflects the standard domestic layout of the 16th and 17th centuries with a central hall containing a cross-passage and a high-end chimney flanked on the left by a service cross-wing and on the right by a parlour cross-wing. The hall may contain older fabric behind its plaster and panelling but the double-jettied parlour wing with its oriel window is the earliest substantially intact part of the house. This contains a clasped-purlin roof with wind-braces of a type that was not introduced into Suffolk until the second quarter of the 16th century and the wing cannot pre-date circa 1530 – despite attributions elsewhere to ‘about 1450’. Its original layout was highly sophisticated, and although it adjoined the chimney of a hall on the street much as today it also possessed a secondary ‘hall’ to the rear with its own cross-passage and service rooms. Additional domestic layouts of this kind are sometimes termed ‘unit houses’ and were associated with semi-independent family members such as widowed mothers. The crosswing’s upper storey was initially open to the roof timbers where early yellow-ochre pigment pre-dates the insertion of a chamfered ceiling in the late-16th century when the main chimney was probably rebuilt with its present arched fireplaces. In the mid-17th century the service wing was rebuilt in second-hand timber without a jetty. A dramatic refurbishment occurred in circa 1700 when the hall was largely rebuilt and provided with its present facade. Both the facade and the interior remain remarkably unaltered, with an extraordinary array of rare and ephemeral features including casement windows with their original folding shutters, a complete suite of pine panelling, a main staircase with barley twist balusters, a fine back stair with splat balusters, overmantle paintings depicting a hunt and the discovery of Moses in the bulrushes in contemporary dress, and a fine plaster ceiling on the upper storey embellished with vine trails and other motifs. Much of the woodwork preserves painted faux wood grain, tortoiseshell and oyster veneer in vivid colour and illustrates the true nature of Queen Anne interiors before the advent of gloss paint. The new hall roof also contains evidence of four original dormer windows that would have commanded fine views of the garden and local landscape. Further documentary research is needed to establish the property’s previous ownership, but the Ufford arms were adopted by the Willoughby family who built Parham Hall around the same time as the parlour wing (now Moat Hall). The oriel window also shows a hunting scene with hounds, a stag and a huntsman which may be significant given that it faces directly towards Park Farm. The Parham Estate was purchased by John Corrance in the 1680s, whose son Clement married the daughter of Sir Robert Davers of Rougham Hall in 1705 – and the Davers crest of a popinjay carrying a ring is repeated no fewer than 16 times on the plaster ceiling. Clement moved to Rougham Hall soon after his marriage and the Parham lands were leased to farmers, which may explain why Church Farmhouse escaped further remodelling, although curiously it did not belong to the Parham Estate in 1840 (S1).