MDE20967 - Rock House Hotel, Lynmouth (Building)

Rock house, manor estate, eastern beach. Late 18th century or early 19th century, now tea-rooms & cottage(?). 2 storey cream-washed. The main part of the house is a square stucco block with hipped low-pitch slate roof with wide eaves. Thatched verandah with rustic posts. French casements and sash windows with glazing bars. Wing to north, stands above the sea wall at the river mouth with mid 19th Century picturesque embellishments. Main part of this front is 3 windows with gothic casements and gabled half-dormers. Ground floor shutters. Gable end has ornamental barge boards. [1] Hotel. Early to mid 19th Century. Rendered, slate roofs. A 2-part building, the slightly earlier range a single-depth 2-storey block to gable ends. Attached to this at its E corner is the main range facing the gardens, an L-plan block with low-pitched hipped roof and deep eaves, entered at the junction between the 2 buildings, and with 2 principal rooms; this range has a thatched verandah on 3 sides. A 2-storey flat-roofed range has been added in the outer angle between the 2 units. Earlier range in 2 storeys, with 3 windows, all 2-light small-pane cast-iron casements with central mullion, 4-centred heads and Y-tracery; those at first floor in small open gablets. At each end gable, which has a scalloped barge-board and terminal drop, is a stack with paired diagonal brick shafts, and the return facing the river has a large 12-pane painted replica light above a single-storey extension with monopitch roof. The principal, inland range in 2 storeys, with sashes; the entrance front has 2+1 twelve-pane above an arched doorway with 20th Century door, and two 20-pane. The frontage facing inland has 2 wide-spaced 12-pane above a large 20-pane reaching to floor level, and a canted bay with French doors and margin bars; the return, to rear, has two 12-pane above a central canted bay matching the other. To right is the later insertion. A thatched verandah roof covers 3 sides of the ground floor, on small square 20th Century timber posts, and with the thatch slightly inflected as 'eyebrows' over the windows on the inland face. Over the door the thatch has been replaced by a section of corrugated plastic. A near-central broad brick stack, and another smaller to the rear. INTERIOR: part of ground floor only inspected. The 2 principal rooms, facing SE, retain white marble fireplaces; the room adjacent to the entry was water damaged in 1993, the other has a fine scrolled plaster ceiling cornice and central rose, and the 2 canted bays have panelled linings and soffits. Some panelled doors in reeded architravres with paterae. This property, a characteristic example in the Picturesque style, formerly had more extensive gardens to the SW, but these were cut back with the realignment of the river bed following the 1952 flood, and it is now supported by a stone retaining wall on this side. [2] The Rock House Hotel is early 19th Century with some cottage ornee features including a thatched veranda on tree-trunks and Gothic style frontage detail. [4] The building was visited in April 2012 as part of the rapid condition survey of Exmoor's Listed Buildings 2012-13. It received a BAR score of 6. [5] The building is mentioned in the 2018 Conservation Area Appraisal for Lynmouth. [6]