The Old House is a former farmhouse in
Harrietsham
Harrietsham is a rural and industrial village and civil parish in the Maidstone District of Kent, England noted in the Domesday Book. According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, it had a population of 1,504, increasing to 2,113 at the 2011 Cen ...
, Kent, built around 1500 and described as "unusually well preserved".
The house is a two-storey
timber frame
Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden ...
d structure with a steeply pitched plain tiled
hipped roof
A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thus, ...
. The right and left ends of the front façade and the two end façades are
jettied
Jettying (jetty, jutty, from Old French ''getee, jette'') is a building technique used in medieval timber-frame buildings in which an upper floor projects beyond the dimensions of the floor below. This has the advantage of increasing the avail ...
with
moulded bressumer
A bressummer, breastsummer, summer beam (somier, sommier, sommer, somer, cross-somer, summer, summier, summer-tree, or dorman, dormant tree) is a load-bearing beam in a timber-framed building. The word ''summer'' derived from sumpter or French ...
beams carrying the load of the upper floor. Windows of various sizes and dates provide illumination to the interior. Internally, the roof structure is formed of tie beams and
crown posts, one of which is octagonal with mouldings. The stairs are original and the hall wall shows smoke blackening from the time before the construction of the chimney when open hearths and roof apertures were used in this type of building.
[
The house is a Grade I ]listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
.
See also
*Grade I listed buildings in Maidstone
There are 42 Grade I listed buildings in Maidstone. The Borough of Maidstone is a local government district in the English county of Kent. The district covers a largely rural area of between the North Downs and the Weald with the town ...
References
{{reflist
Borough of Maidstone
Grade I listed houses in Kent
Houses completed in the 16th century