Interior Design in Gosforth and Jesmond

Gosforth, a Collection of Best Examples

Drawn from the conservation area character statement and profile published by Newcastle City Council.

Gosforth Conservation Area was designated on 26 April 2002. The council’s reason is unusually warm for a planning document: the housing stock is “almost a collection of best examples of High Victorian, Queen Anne Revival and Edwardian house styles”, not represented in such quality anywhere else in the city. There are 49 Grade II listed buildings in the conservation area and nine sites on the local list.

The suburb grew from Coxlodge Hall, built in 1796 by Job Bulman, and from Bulman Village, laid out along the High Street from the 1820s. Streets were built in short sections by small builders, so it is common to find several kinds of house on one street.

What the houses are made of

• Walls. The earlier terraces are stone and brick, often brick with a stone front. From the turn of the century brick predominates, from cream and glazed white to true red and a softer reddish brown, mixed with rendered panels, pebbledash and terracotta detail. Stone is kept for surrounds and boundary walls.
• Roofs. Blue Welsh slate, green Lakeland slate, plain clay tiles and pantiles, with decorative ridge tiles and terracotta chimneys on the later terraces.
• Windows. Typically timber sliding sashes in three patterns: six panes per sash, the later Victorian single pane with horns, and the Edwardian single lower pane under a multi-paned upper sash. Bays on the later terraces rise two storeys, often with leaded or stained glass.
• Doors. Six-panelled or half-glazed, painted dark blue, green, red or black, often under a timber porch.

Sources: Gosforth Conservation Area Character Statement; Conservation Area Profile 17, Gosforth (all Newcastle City Council, PDF).

Jesmond, Villas and the Dene

Drawn from the council’s character statements for South Jesmond and Jesmond Dene.

South Jesmond Conservation Area was designated in 1987. The council describes large detached and semi-detached Victorian villas in large gardens, twentieth century development on the old villa plots, Victorian terraces, and open space. In the mid nineteenth century this part of Jesmond was home to shipbuilders and shipowners, G B Hunter of Swan Hunter among them, and from the 1870s those houses were surrounded by more modest terraces spreading north either side of Osborne Road.

Jesmond Dene Conservation Area was designated in 1991 and extended in 2001 to protect the Dene and its setting. Lord Armstrong and his wife laid the Dene out as pleasure grounds in the woodland garden style and gave it to the city in 1883. Most of the housing either side of it dates from the early twentieth century, replacing the villas of the 1870s and 1880s. St George’s Church is listed at Grade I and Jesmond Towers at Grade II*.

We do not yet have a Jesmond project to show you. The Gosforth homes below are the nearest.

Sources: South Jesmond Character Statement; Jesmond Dene Character Statement (all Newcastle City Council, PDF).

What a Victorian or Edwardian House Asks of Its Rooms

Plain observations from three whole homes in Gosforth. Not rules, and every house is different.

The bay window is the room’s best feature and its hardest to dress. At Springfield, deep bays were dressed in Roman blinds and patterned pelmets in a way that reads as tailoring rather than decoration, and the ornate cornice above was given the quiet it deserves. At Sycamore, linen curtains in the bay and the bed set to face the morning light. At Montagu, striped linen drapes reach floor to ceiling.

Tall rooms take colour well. Deep terracotta-red panelled walls in the Montagu dining room, herringbone parquet underfoot. Vintage map wallpaper and a burgundy velvet sofa in the Springfield lounge. Slatted timber and a palette of charcoal, taupe and burgundy at Sycamore, where the brief was to hold darkness with grace. Rooms that feel tonal rather than dim.

The original details are worth keeping and lighting well: a plaster ceiling rose under a crystal chandelier in the Montagu dressing room, a cast-iron radiator against an encaustic tiled floor. The quieter rooms, the back lobby, the utility, the hall, treated as seriously as the centrepieces.

If the house is in a conservation area

Conservation area status concerns the character and appearance of the area. Listing is different. Historic England is clear that listing covers the entire building, and that works needing consent can include internal alterations. Redecorating and furnishing, as we read it, are not what the consent is aimed at, and that is where most of our work sits. On a listed house we would check with the conservation officer first.

Sources: Conservation Area Profile 17, Gosforth; What Are Listed Buildings? (Historic England); the project pages linked below.