Elmhurst

Detached three-bay single-storey L-plan gate lodge, built c. 1870, with projections and mid-late twentieth-century lean-to porch to front re-entrant angle. Overhanging pitched and hipped slate roof with profiled ridge tiles and exposed rafter tails, pierced bargeboards and timber finials to gables on profiled timber brackets, and cast-iron rainwater goods. Tall red brick chimneystacks with brick banding. Red brick walling laid in Flemish bond with black brick bands and rock-faced snecked limestone plinth. Square-headed window openings having brick reveals and gauged brick lintels, granite sills and two-over-two pane timber sliding sash windows. Glazed door fittings to recent porch. Adjacent to north entrance to Hampstead Estate, with mature trees to setting.

An attractive and well-proportioned gate lodge characterized by a lively palette of polychrome brick, granite and limestone, as well as decorative bargeboards and finials, typical of its period. A lodge was present on the site from at least 1843 marking the entrance to Hampstead Castle, the latter demolished in the late nineteenth century. The present lodge was most likely built around the time of Elmhurst, constructed in 1869, and with which it shares many stylistic elements. It is one of several buildings constructed by the Eustace family in connection with the Hampstead Estate, which evolved throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide advanced and humane care and treatment for people suffering from mental illnesses.