Summary

House. c1820-26. The later C19 extension to the rear is not of special interest and is excluded from the listing.

Description

MATERIALS: brick faced in stucco; modern render to flank walls; slate roofs

PLAN: the main house was two rooms deep to either side of a central hall and rear stair. Large openings have been made in the spine wall between the front and rear rooms; the eastern rear room appears to have once been subdivided to form an additional small room at the rear. The rear west bedroom has been subdivided and an additional door added from the landing.

EXTERIOR: the house is two storeys high above basement, and has a shallow hipped roof with boxed eaves. Chimney stacks have been truncated. The symmetrical three-bay front elevation has panelled angle pilasters; all windows have decorative lugged detail to the cills. The central round-arched entrance has a radial fanlight; the door and steps are modern. Windows to either side are round headed with moulded surrounds, and have wooden sashes with radial glazing bars and margin lights. Upper-floor windows have 6-over-6 pane sashes, also with margin lights. The rear elevation has sash windows; that to the ground-floor east room replaced with a modern casement.

INTERIOR: moulded cornice and arch to hall. The open-string well stair has column newels, a mahogany handrail, stick balusters and scrolled silhouette tread ends, terminating in a curtail. The west front room has a reeded cornice; the east room a moulded cornice and deep plaster decorative frieze of late C19/early C20 appearance; to the rear of this room a door of similar date with paterae ornament leads through to the rear extension. Surviving joinery includes window architraves and aprons; panelled shutters to ground-floor front windows, some door architraves and a few sections of skirting. No fireplaces or original panelled doors survive.

History

The land alongside this stretch of Staines Road began to be developed after 1813 following the Enclosures award for Bedfont Parish, gradually acquiring detached and semi-detached villas set in spacious grounds. The area retained its semi-rural character until the inter-war period.

Holmwood was built between c1820-26 by Thomas Fagg, stagecoach proprietor, landowner and builder of Fagg’s Bridge over the Duke of Northumberland’s river to the north-west; this structure has been demolished but the name survives in Fagg’s Road. The OS first edition (1865) shows the house with a pair of short, set-back side wings forming a T-plan; on the east side of the front elevation, in the angle between the flank wall and side wing, was a glazed structure, presumably a conservatory. This footprint is consistent with that shown on the 1840 Bedfont tithe map. To the west of the house was a stable block and to the north-west a small range of outbuildings. By 1876 a rear wing had been added. In 1945 Holmwood was acquired for office use by the Minimax Fire Extinguisher works which had been built to the west of the house in 1911; the firm later became part of Chubb Security. In 1984 the factory was demolished and redeveloped as the Griffin Centre industrial estate, encompassing Holmwood, its garden and the land to the east.

Photographs of 1974 and 1978 show that the west wing was one storey high and much altered or rebuilt; the east wing was two storeys high and probably contemporary with the house. Building works were evidently in progress in 1978 and it may have been at this time that the side wings and stables were demolished. Holmwood is now the sole survivor of the Regency and Victorian villas that stood along this stretch of Staines Road.

Reasons for Listing

Holmwood, No. 134 Staines Road, Feltham, built c1820-26, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* Architectural interest: an 1820s house retaining a significant proportion of its historic fabric;
* Rarity: as a survival of the type of middle-status Georgian villas that once abounded on the rural fringes of London and Middlesex, now relatively rare in a regional context

External Links

• Historic England Listing
• Wikidata Q26337524

External links are from the relevant listing authority and, where applicable, Wikidata. Wikidata IDs may be related buildings as well as this specific building. If you want to add or update a link, you will need to do so by editing the Wikidata entry.

Recommended Books

• 
  Warwickshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Old House Handbook: A Practical Guide to Care and Repair
• 
  Herefordshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Devon (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Somerset: South and West (Pevsner Architectural Guides) (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
• 
  Wiltshire (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)