Diamond Cottage is a rustic cottage designed by John Nash (1752–1835) and George Stanley Repton (died 1858) in Blaise Hamlet, Bristol, England.
The picturesque cottage is one of a group of ten built around 1810 as retirement homes for the servants of a wealthy banker.
Location
The land on which the cottage stands is part of an estate purchased by John Scandrett Harford, a banker, for £13,000 in 1789.
Harford had a substantial house built and asked the landscape architect Humphry Repton to lay out the grounds.
Repton became a partner of John Nash, whom Harford commissioned to design a group of cottages as homes for his retired servants.
Nash created sketches of the cottages, which George Repton built.[1]
The cottages surround an open green.[2]
Each cottage faces the green and has a separate back garden.[3]
They were described by Pevsner as "...the nec plus ultra of picturesque layout and design".[2]
When built, the cottages would have been set in open country.
Since then the group of cottages has been surrounded by a high wall, which hides the modern housing around them.[3]
The hamlet became a National Trust property in 1943.[1]
Diamond Cottage was made a listed building, grade I: buildings of exceptional interest, on 8 January 1959.[2]
It is listed as 901-1/20/1341, no. 2 Blaise Hamlet, Diamond Cottage on Hallen Road.[4]
The exterior has been carefully restored, while the interior has been modernised and is still occupied.[1]
The cottage is rented by the National Trust.[3]
Description
The picturesque style Diamond Cottage was built in 1812.[2]
It is faced with random rubble.
The hipped roof is tiled in stone, and has two diagonally-set brick chimney stacks to the rear.
On two sides there is a pent roof over a deep coved eave, with a leaded lattice casement in each wall.
The cottage is entered from the left through a plank door in a porch with a pitched roof.[2]
Before renovation it had a kitchen, sitting room, scullery and outside lavatory.[3]
The attic with a half dormer is reached by a dogleg stairway.
The cottage interior was modernised around 1975.[2]
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