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Summary

Description

Dated 1881; rear addition dated 1908. Extensive, 2-storey and attic, irregular-plan, Scots Renaissance-style villa, with crowstepped gables, some mullioned windows, steep, flat-topped pyramidal roof to tower, and some strapwork window pediments (see NOTES) to principal (SE) elevation. Squared, bull-faced, cream sandstone with polished ashlar dressings. Base course; eaves course; 1st-floor arcaded band course and machicolated eaves course to entrance tower. Roll-moulded window margins to principal elevation; chamfered margins elsewhere.

PRINCIPAL (SE) ELEVATION: Slightly advanced central entrance tower with roll-moulded arch and 2 marble steps to internal porch; transomed and mullioned bipartite window with strapwork pediment above; colonnette quoins at 1st floor; cast-iron brattishing to roof. Gable to left with 2-storey canted window. Bay to right with strapwork pediment to ground-floor window and stone-finialled, pedimented dormerhead to 1st-floor window.

FURTHER DESCRIPTION: M-gabled NE elevation with gablehead stack and projecting, single-storey, gabled service wing to right. Irregular fenestration to SW elevation with tall, 9-light, mullioned and transomed stair window, wallhead dormer to left, and projecting, single-storey, gabled billiard room extension on raised ground to outer left with canted window with corbelled-out gable bearing monogram and date (see NOTES). Irregular fenestration to rear elevation.

Plate glass in timber sash and case windows. Grey fishscale tiles to tower; graded grey slate elsewhere. Ashlar-coped sandstone stacks with some octagonal buff clay cans. Cast-iron rainwater goods.

INTERIOR: 6-panel timber front door in timber architrave with narrow rectangular side lights within open porch. Inner lobby with geometric Gothic-style ceramic-tiled floor, barrel-vaulted ceiling, and half-glazed inner door in timber architrave with semicircular fanlight and narrow rectangular side lights. Timber scale-and-platt principal stair with timber balustrade, handrail and ball-finialled square newels. Billiards room in 1908 extension with fine decorative plaster ceiling, Lincrusta frieze, timber chimneypiece with Classical detailing including garlands and cherubs, and copper Art Nouveau finger plates to doors. Pantry with original timber cupboards and sliding service hatch to kitchen. 7-panel timber doors to principal ground-floor rooms; 4-panel timber doors elsewhere. Decorative plaster cornices. Fine Classical drawing room chimneypiece with figurative plaster detail; marble dining room chimneypiece with good Delft tiles; some plain timber chimneypieces elsewhere. Some working timber shutters.

Statement of Special Interest

A good, virtually unaltered, late-19th-century, Scots Renaissance villa with fine Flemish- and Gothic-inspired detailing a considerable amount of high-quality interior features remaining, and an early-20th-century extension with similarly fine detailing and interior.

The house was built for Robert Pringle (1862-1953), grandson of the founder of the Pringle knitwear firm and at that time the head of the company, who was reputedly determined that his home should be more lavish than the recently constructed, adjacent villa of Westwood (also listed). The rear extension was built by Robert Pringle to house a billiard room for his son Walter Gerald Pringle, and bears the monogram REP and date 1908. Just a few years after its construction, Walter was killed at Passchendaele during the First World War.

The house appears as Craigmore on the 2nd Edition Ordnance Survey map (1897), but had been renamed Wood Norton by the time of the 3rd Edition Ordnance Survey map (1917).

The strapwork on the tower includes an interlaced motif indicating the date, 1881, to the front, and a conch motif to the side, whilst that above the ground-floor window in the bay to the right contains the letter 'P', a reference to Pringle.

References

Bibliography

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