Building record ESO 033 - Street Farm

Street Farm is a grade II*-listed timberframed building which contains a number of historically important features including a late-15th century carved crown-post and an exceptional wall painting of the early- 18th century depicting the defeat of Hector. The architectural development of the house is of unusual complexity, having evolved from a rare non-domestic structure, jettied on three sides, which may have been designed as a manorial court house or guild hall on the green.

The rear kitchen wing is the earliest part of the house and was originally an ostentatious free-standing structire which lacked a chimney but boasted finely carved oriel windows and overhanging jetties on three sides. Just ten feet wide on the ground floor, its principal chamber lay on its upper storey and was spanned by a decorated crown-post truss. This layout is typical of late-15th and early-16th century public buildings in Suffolk, particularly those which served as the halls of religious guilds, but its diminutive proportions are unique and of great historic interest. By the beginning of the 17th century the building had apparently been converted into the rear annex or store room of a normal domestic house, as the present hall dates from this period. A service cross-wing of the same date, or slightly later, was built in front of the jettied range leaving a narrow light well between the two into which a chimney was later inserted, and in the late-18th century a second cross-wing was added alongside . The parlour at the opposite end of the hall was rebuilt in the late-17th century and its roof of staggered butt-purlins extended over the old hall, the walls of which were raised to match those of the taller new parlour. The present profile of the house was completed in the 19th century by building a lean-to against the rear wing, and by truncating the vertical gables of the two service cross-wings (S1).