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House restoration

The Regency Town House is a five storey, Grade 1 Listed, terraced house of the mid 1820's, designed by the Regency architect Charles Augustin Busby. The building's Grade 1 Listed status reflects its designation as being of outstanding historical and architectural importance. The major masonry elements of the House are built principally of brick and bungaroush (ancient Brighton name for flint and lime walling), with the front elevation being stuccoed (rendered) in 'classical' style, as is shown in the photograph on this page. The interior is principally a softwood timber framework with lath and plaster over.

The original, internal layout of the House follows the 'standard' Brighton pattern for a large terraced home of its day: The downstairs basement (the so called 'domestic offices') comprised the housekeeper's room, wine cellar, servants' hall, butler's pantry, kitchen, scullery and larder areas, all of which were worked in by servants. Upstairs, the family used the ground floor dining room and parlour, the first floor front and back drawing rooms and the two large bedrooms and dressing room on the second floor. The top floor comprised five further small bedrooms, some used by the family and the rest by servants. To the rear of the property is a small 'wing', principally providing further servant accommodation.

The above-ground rooms of the Town House are currently being returned to their original layout and decorative style. It is planned that the basement of the House will be developed as a library and an education centre for younger visitors.

More recently, with the help of Town House visitors and the National Lottery we have purchased a nearby basement at 10 Brunswick Square. This site is almost perfectly preserved as a set of domestic offices and is being developed as our 'below-stairs' basement annexe with a focus on the life of the Regency servant.

Projects

Basement Annexe virtual tour

Just a few short steps away from The Regency Town House visitors can discover the superbly preserved Basement at 10 Brunswick Square. This unique 'time capsule' has remained virtually unchanged since it was built over 170 years ago and retains many original Regency features, including the wine cellar, butler's pantry, servants' hall, walk-in meat safe, kitchen, vaulted coal stores, even the chicken coup in the central yard! The Basement Annexe was purchased by the Trust in 1996 with the aid of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and donations from concerned organisations and individuals. Once restoration work is complete, it will function as a 'below-stairs' museum, providing an insight into the lives of those in domestic service during Regency times and complementing the grand rooms on view at No.13.

Kitchen skylight photo gallery

The restoration of No. 10s kitchen skylight is complete, largely thanks to Joe Thompson of Sussex Oak & Iron. When work began over half of the structure was missing and, to ensure historically appropriate repair work, much research had to be undertaken via period textbooks and surviving skylights elsewhere in the Brighton area. However we could not find another skylight that completely matched ours and in the end a lot of the information we used during repair had to be obtained archaeologically from the surviving timbers.

During his work, Joe noted the role that both carpenters and joiners had played in the building of our skylight. A sequence of carpenters assembly marks proved that they had been responsible for the rough timber carcass. Joiners had then over-boarded this to provide the finishing detail to the frame and then fitted prefabricated windows and roof glazing bars.

In his book Practical Carpenter (1836), Nicholson defines the carpenters job as "The art of applying and joining rough timbers so as to give the greatest degree of strength, and that of the joiner as uniting and framing wood, for the internal and external finishing of buildings... it is requisite that all the parts should be much more nicely adjusted to each other than carpentry."

Ceiling roses photo gallery

Our ceiling roses are back!

Both the front and back drawing rooms and the dining room to No. 13 originally had ceiling roses. A rose, or ceiling centre, is an ornamental detail from which a chandelier might appear to hang, the decorative style of a rose is often matched to that a rooms' cornice.

Unfortunately the original ceiling roses at No. 13 were lost during post-second-world-war modernisation. After much research we have been able to identify that ours would have looked identical to the roses found in two other Brunswick Square houses and we have been allowed to copy these in order to recreate the fittings in our own rooms.

These roses appear in houses in Brunswick Square and were some of the roses we looked at during our research.

Our drawing room roses are copied from a pattern used in 56 Brunswick Square and the dining room rose from a fitting installed at 21 Brunswick Square.

The work to reinstate our ceiling roses was undertaken by Neil England, a specialist ornamental plasterer, assisted by some of our volunteers. The process of recreating the roses was complex. Some of the pieces were copied from original fittings which we were allowed to temporarily remove from Nos. 56 and 21. Others were made from scratch by carefully taking the dimensions of original items and then producing copies as master 'bucks' for subsequent moulding and casting.

The process was further complicated by the fact that some of the original rose pieces were not correctly fitted when first installed - a number of the outer 'plates' being laid incorrectly with a resultant 'break' in the supposedly continuous pattern of the outer plates!