The Porch House in the main street of Potterne is one of the best-known smaller domestic buildings in Wiltshire.
It is an early-16th-century timber-framed house on an ashlar plinth and consists of a central hall, two-storied gabled wings, and a two-storied porch opening into the hall passage.
The bay window of the hall is glazed with pieces of stained glass, doubtless the fruit of some collector's zeal. Late in the 17th century a large central chimney of oak and wattle was added, partly blocking up the hall.
The original owner of the house is not known.
The house is said to have been used successively as a brewery, a bake-house, and an inn.
In 1869 there were persons living in Potterne who remembered the discovery of the ancient inn sign—'The White Horse'.
Some years before 1869 the house had been altered to permit its division into four of five cottages.
A tablet on the front of the house is inscribed 'repaired 1847' and this was probably the date of the alterations. These included the cutting of new doorways and windows, the blocking up of other windows and the front of the porch, the insertion of staircases, the plastering of the open timber roof, and the removal of part of the pendants and tracery which reached from the roof to within two or three feet of the upper floor.
In 1876 the house was restored for its owner, George Richmond (1809–96) the portrait painter, by the architect Ewan Christian. The 17th-century chimney was removed and the alterations of 1847 were as far as possible swept away.
The date 1876 is inscribed on the brackets of a bay window at the back of the house. Half of the ancient iron-bound door previously removed from the porch was discovered in a local pig-sty and restored to its proper position.
@dishaparekh176 Thanks Disha for your comments. As the timbers are black & the panels are white between it probably is the best way to photo this great house.
