Sherborne House
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Sherborne House Its character and history The short main street of Lyme Regis climbs steeply from the sea, and near the top on the right is a blue door that excites curiosity. It’s down a couple of steps, and is recessed under a white entablature on which “Sherborne House” is painted in elegant letters. This is the only residence that opens directly onto the historic street. (Others are up stairways beside shops, or are reached along passages.) Therefore the ground-floor window is protected by an iron railing, of the same pleasing shade of shiny light blue, and this encloses a small area containing flowers and a wisteria that copiously frames the door, and sometimes rambles over the shop windows on either side. This vegetation, also, is unique on the street. There are shops on either side, that on the left being at the very top of the street, on the corner of Sherborne Lane. But if you step back you can see that these must formerly have been parts of Sherborne House. The threefold unit has one roof and one façade, unified by a symmetrical cornice across the top, along which stands an array of classical urns. The roofline, though at the top of the steep street, is lower than those of the other buildings around, all of which are of three storeys and are newer. This evidently was once a “gentleman’s house” in 18th-century style, probably with grounds extending down Sherborne Lane from which it got its name (a name going back to the earliest record of Lyme, in the 8th century). But it has been complicated by a series of changes, some of which you can already see. Not only did the left and right parts of the ground floor become shops, but with the left part went the storey above it, and that whole left part is now painted pink, as if deliberately to break up the unity. Thus Sherborne House became separated from Sherborne Lane. What it’s like inside Entering through the blue door, you find yourself not in a reception room such as the mansion once had, but in a humble passage more suggestive of a farmhouse. There is light at the other end from a glazed garden door. There is a diamond- checkerboard tiled floor, some exposed masonry, roughened ancient beams, two doors to rooms on the left, and between them a carpeted stair. Go up this rather short stair and you may be uncertain which way to turn; there are several doors around. Doubling back along a landing, you burst into the main room, 23 feet long and (irregularly) about 16 wide. This exemplifies a principle used in houses designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright: if you are made to enter by way of confined passages, emergence into a sudden large interior is all the more impressive. The room’s pine floor has plenty of space for rugs and couches, but the space is varied by features that include beams, a projecting wall, and a masonry wall containing two large hearths side by side. The end wall, 16 by 8 feet, is covered by the house’s largest (though by no means only) set of bookshelves. One of the windows is a wide bay overlooking the street. Visitors to the house sometimes get a little lost on the way out To live in it is to continue to relish its surprises. The window bay is filled by a knee-height dais, so that, strewn with cushions, it is a bower. From it down to the left can be seen the sea. And it is a grandstand for the Lyme Regis pageantry that so often takes place immediately below – the jazz festival, lifeboat week, carnival and regatta week, the fossil festival, the food festival, the folk music weekend, Candles on the Cobb, Guitars on the Beach, the 1644 siege re-enactment, the Sir George Somers of Bermuda parade, the runner with the Olympic torch, the Good Friday procession, the Easter and Christmas parades. Many of these assemble in the forecourt of the cinema, at eye level just opposite here, and march off down the street. Those two large hearths side by side, what is the reason for them? There once was a main fireplace in the room below, and the chimney flue rose straight up from it. Therefore the fireplace in this upper room had to be displaced into the room’s corner, and its own tributary flue sloped leftward to join the main one. After the fireplace below disappeared, a new one could be opened vertically above it, more centrally for the room. Its arch was formed of two blocks of Ham Stone, which may originally have been coping stones from walls. The corner fireplace became disused, and its side flue is blocked, but its hearth has been re-opened to display the history, and serves as a cave in which wood can be stored. (Around in the kitchen there is a wood-lined storage cubby-hole at head height. It is a recent utilisation of just a small part of the irregular space left inside the chimney mass, an air-space which reaches into the next building down the street.) The house contained at least five other fireplaces: in the kitchen and the bedroom, in the utility room, in what is now the left-hand shop, and across a corner of the room by the front door (its brickwork showing beside that door). But of these, the first has only a brick stub of a chimney above it, the second a flue that is blocked inside the wall, the third has disappeared entirely, and only the last is still usable. And if you light a fire in it, where does the smoke go, since only one brick chimneystack survives above the roof? Go into the street and see. The smoke emerges from one of those ornamental urns! Yet other fireplaces were in the rooms that are now the two shops. The left-hand one survives as a bay inside the shop, and its massive chimneybreast projects into Sherborne Lane, narrowing the upper end of the lane to seven feet. The front wall of the house is more than twenty inches thick, as can be seen from the wide sills of the wood-shuttered windows piercing it. Surfaces of masonry exposed in the downstairs passage, the bedroom and the living room, and other surfaces plastered, are segments of an even thicker wall (parts of which, amazingly, are now supported on concealed steel beams). This wall was once the back of the house, showing that rooms have been added beyond it. TThe house has the feeling of being knitted into the fabric of the old town. The bedroom and utility room share a block with what is behind the left-hand shop. The kitchen is above the rear extension of the right-hand shop, and one of the outbuildings along the side of the garden belongs to the shop, the other to the house. From just outside the back door, a window in a projecting corner of that shop gives a glimpse all through the shop to the street. Because of the way the house has grown – beside a sloping street and in pieces behind and over each other – every room is on a different level. (Only one is level with the downstairs passage, and only one with the upstairs landing.) So there are many steps. Three openings are grouped at a corner of the living room (two of them through one gap in the thick wall): up two steps to the landing; down one angled step to the bathroom; up four steps that twist through a connecting piece to the kitchen. (And through the door to the landing is glimpsed another door, which conceals a nine-step staircase.) Some of the rooms are fairly low-ceilinged (hence the shortness of the stairway). But the large kitchen and bedroom rise to their roofs in pyramidal spaces, crossed by beams of which some are free and some embedded in the plaster. Skylights have been opened at half a dozen interesting points in the roofs. Through the one in the bedroom, moonlight floods and stars are glimpsed. Even though the bedroom is on the quiet northern side of the house, the view from it through this skylight is to the south: that is, high on the meridian, so that the winter full moon appears in it at midnight, as do stars in their seasons – Vega in June, Capella in December – and planets when at their nearest and brightest, such as Jupiter at its opposition in October 2011. A point of interest to skylovers! From the bedroom’s main window you may feel that you are overlooked by other buildings close around – then you realize that they are all parts of this house! The bathroom, one of the additions at the back, is made light by a triangular window- projection, providing a useful sill and looking into the garden. The bedroom is adjacent to the bathroom in that they share a section of wall, yet the route from one to the other is quite lengthy, wrapping around a fireplace, the stair, and another door that you may not at first have noticed. This is a plain latched wooden door beside the landing, next to a white surface that rises over the stairway in a smoothly twisted curve. The surface envelops the underside of nine pinewood steps that spiral tightly to the attic. They would not be able to do so but that a space has been made for them by adding a dormer window in the roof.