5. First Floor
A detailed look at the first floor of the original house and the extensions
In the inner hall we look upwards to the hemispherical dome which drenches the inner hall with light – added, as we already know, to provide this light after the original Dining Room was added by the Rev John Halls in 1780. We ascend the wide staircase with its two bends to the left and we admire once again the impressive balusters on the left and the equally magnificent oak panelling on the right. As we step onto the main landing we are experiencing what perhaps is the most lavish piece of decoration in the whole of this neo-classical building. We face the Venetian window which looks out onto the High Street, flanked by adjoining rooms. Our backs are towards the 1780 mezzanine floor with its delightful central balcony room overlooking the garden. The rest of the relatively plain first floor rooms of 1904 fall away from the corridors to east and west adjoining this original highly-decorative landing.
We are surrounded by classical mouldings of every type – around doorways, coving, panelling, and of course the central Venetian window. It is difficult to imagine that this richly-decorated space was only the landing of a 1755 house. It might have fulfilled another purpose. In Garraway’s sale of August 1813 the house is described as having “seven airy bedchambers on the first storey with storeroom, closets etc.” Two of these lead off the landing, have windows to the front and are also heavily decorated – unusual for bedrooms. Two more, plainer, ones are now indistinguishable having been absorbed by the east and west extensions made in 1904. Both of these, as with all bedrooms of this period, would have had fireplaces, which, of necessity were removed to make way for the corridors to the east and west. The other three bedrooms occupy the mezzanine floor.
Another reference in a paper attributed to the late Enid Bishop, a former Principal of the college, states that the contrast in styles between some plainer rooms on the ground floor and some more decorative ones on the first floor suggest that the clergyman (the Rev John Halls) occupied the plainer rooms and his wife and mother-in-law occupied the more decorative ones. But this model does not seem to fit.
It is tempting to speculate that this relatively large landing with its four adjoining bedrooms was a “piano nobile” which would have been copied from a Palladian building of the Renaissance period where the first floor, and its rooms, were a reception area for guests. This would explain the lavish decorations which were to impress the guests. Against this theory is the fact that there is no external cascading stairway. This was a very important feature in Palladian style buildings (such as Chiswick House in London which has an exceptional example) to allow access to the first floor reception area without passing through the mundane ground floor and servants’ quarters.
Whatever the reason behind this exceptionally decorative landing, it can still be admired. There are mouldings of many types and several that are very typically favoured by the Victorians. Most of these are carved wood in contrast to those in the Adam style already seen in the ground floor Dining Room which were mostly of plaster and gesso. Above the oak panelling of the staircase is a moulding known as ‘running dog’. Oak panelling to the dado rail would have continued around all the walls of the landing.
Oak would also have been used to frame the doorways. At the time of writing the panelled doors and surrounds have been picked out (during the 1980s) in blue and white which lighten the effect. These were the favourite pale sky blue and white of Robert Adam’s choice (see Appendix). In the 1700s, also, many of the mouldings would have been emphasised with lavish gold leaf. Others would have been left in their natural dark oak state. The mouldings around all four doorways leading off the landing follow an ordered scheme. Egg and dart (another favourite Victorian moulding) appears around all of them. Additional mouldings include those known as bead, cable, wave and dentil (see Appendix).
The intricacies of the carvings around the Venetian window are quite exceptional. At least two more types of mouldings can be distinguished here and corbels make an additional decorative feature.
Carvings around window 
first floor 
They surmount the two carved sections which separate the arched central portion of the window from the two flanking rectangular sections. Here the attention to detail and meticulous carving almost stop us in our tracks. The two panels are individually worked and far from matched, neither are they mirror images. They are not intended to be.
Twining stems, foliage and flowers are rich and lifelike – much in the manner of Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721). He was a leading English sculptor who not only worked in marble, stone and bronze, but was much more famous for his decorative carvings in wood – particularly limewood – which were delicately executed as ornament for panelled interiors, picture frames, overmantels, choir stalls and screens (such as those in St Pauls’ Cathedral). Several of his contemporaries and those who followed on after him were heavily influenced by his designs and techniques, and it is possible that the sculptor of these Venetian window carvings was touched by his genius. This interesting landing in the days of the Adult Community College was, for a period of time, a library, where the motifs around could be as stimulating as the words in the books themselves. In contrast, when the building was occupied by Colchester County High School, the space under the Venetian window was the sick bay, with the bed head immediately underneath the window – facing it with its intricate beauty would surely have produced instant recovery!
Continuing our tour, a panelled door to the east with its surrounding egg and dart mouldings and scroll and leaf decoration above leads to a highly decorated room, which in the days of the Adult College was the Registry. Whether it was the master bedroom of the original house or an elaborate reception room designed to impress is again a matter for speculation. In shape and size it reflects the room below. All window and door surrounds and coving are lavishly decorated with egg and dart and dentil mouldings. The bay with its three sash windows, shutters and shelves exactly matches those of the Breakfast Room on the ground floor.
The most outstanding features of this room are the overmantel and the fireplace. The overmantel appears to be original and includes a mirror which reflects light back into the room. This gives added credence to the fact that this room on the first floor was far too impressive to be just a bedroom.
The decorative pine surround of the mirror (which almost extends to the coving of the ceiling) is exquisitely carved with vine leaves and bunches of grapes which hang in full ripeness down both sides of the frame. Each side of the mirror, like the Venetian window decoration, is not matched and quite independent. The grandness of the over-mantel overshadows the fine mouldings of the coving in this room. Here we have the usual dentils and below this a variation of egg and dart around the entire circumference of the room.
The fire grate in cast iron has moulded acanthus leaves and other floral designs and is almost certainly original and contemporary with the period of the room. This in turn is surrounded by pink-striated marble raised into concentric ridges. This has an additional wooden surround which is elaborately carved. At the time of writing these carvings cannot be clearly distinguished because unfortunately in the days of the Adult Community College they were covered over with red paint together with the mantelshelf and its fine supporting corbels.
We now return to the landing and explore the room on the western side of the Venetian window. In the Adult Community College, this was the Senior Tutors’ room, and we will now assume that it was bedroom number two in 1755.
We find again, that it is identical in size and shape to the room below it on the ground floor – the Morning Room. It is also very similar to the master bedroom which we have just left – but it lacks the luxurious details and extensive decorations. The bow window is similar with small seats below. The only significant decorations are the dentils around the coving. As we turn round to face north the fireplace is seen to be relatively simple with a cast-iron undecorated grate either side of which is a single vertical row of rose-coloured tiles. The whole is surrounded firstly by black marble and then by a pale grey mottled marble with matching mantelshelf. This is a fireplace that has been adapted at a later date – probably in Victorian times.
Unlike the master bedroom, however, either side of the fireplace there is a door, and each door leads into a cupboard space on either side of the chimney breast. One of these cupboards (on the west side) has an additional door leading out from the back. The one on the eastern side would also have once had a door at the back. The whole of this chimney area and two cupboards would have originally backed onto bedroom number three in the Rev John Halls’ house, the two cupboards perhaps acting as closets – one to each bedroom. Here the occupants of each bedroom could retire to pray, look at paintings, study, meditate in solitude or store away treasures. But by the time that this house was built, closets were becoming redundant. In the present building, at the time of writing, we have to imagine this because of the east wing added in 1904 which took part of this bedroom to make a corridor running westwards.
Leaving this bedroom and entering the landing again, we return to the top of the main staircase. Opening the door on the left with its matching decorated surround, on the west side of the landing, we see a corridor. This corridor firstly leads to an archway. This archway marks the point where the 1904 extension began and would originally have been part of the space of bedroom three – the rest of the room being made up by the small room on our right – the opposite side (north) of this corridor. There was a bedroom fireplace between two cupboard doors which was removed during the extensions westwards in 1904.
Turning around again and looking through the archway leading westwards is the corridor again which forms part of the newer west wing built on by the French nuns in 1904. Two doors are in the distance on the left; the first leads into a small room with two sash windows, and the second into a larger room with three windows; one of these is a 1904 copy of a Venetian window which allows the frontage of the building to be in keeping with the original neo-classical style of the C18th. No elaborate decorative mouldings exist either on the inside or outside of this window, but the three sections of the false Venetian window are enclosed, as can be seen in the photograph, by an archway in relief. During the time the Adult Community College occupied the site this room was a spacious computer room.
Outside this room, just discernible from our new viewpoint, a flight of six steps rises at right-angles to the western corridor. This takes us into a further short corridor with three rooms on the immediate left (west). These steps with the elevated cluster of rooms give added height to the large original chapel which the nuns added on the ground floor below us. This was later used as a hall for both school and college gatherings. But we shall have a further detailed look at this area towards the end of our tour.
Returning to the top of the main staircase again and looking through the door which leads to the corridor to the east it is obvious that this is an almost exact mirror image of the other corridor and its adjacent rooms. Exactly the same situation exists here. The doorway marks the point where the new east wing was built in 1904, and this first section of the corridor forms part of bedroom number four which backs onto the chimney breast of the master bedroom number one, and would have also included the small room on the left (a block of toilets in school/college days). It also, as a bedroom, would have had a fireplace, later removed by the nuns to accommodate the new east wing.
It is now time to explore this initial small section of the east wing corridor. As we enter the first part of the corridor (originally part of bedroom four) we notice immediately that there are some interesting features on the right-hand wall which backs onto the master bedroom number one. It is obvious that these do not just conceal a large void behind the panelling. Firstly, the chimney of the master bedroom occupies the majority of this space but the panel on the nearest side to the landing has a very hollow sound when tapped, and opening the inset door we discover that the servants’ narrow twisting staircase from the ground floor is accessible here, and that it continues upwards to the second floor and downwards to the ground floor.
The rest of this space around the chimney breast is occupied by a store cupboard, but immediately in front of the chimney there is a large metal handle and a slot which resembles a letter box. As this is immediately above a similar structure on the ground floor we can speculate that it was, in the Rev John Halls’ day, a type of dumb waiter which must have continued to the second floor above and the servants’ quarters. There is also a flue here to the large chimney stack which may have been to assist the sweeping process of the two back-to-back fireplaces.
The rooms to the south of this eastward-running corridor are exact mirror images of those in the west wing. A small room on the right has a sash window facing the High Street and the next larger room has a matching false Venetian window similar in dimensions to the one in the west wing. Again, the three sections of this window are enclosed internally by a decorative archway in relief.
On the opposite side of the corridor to this room, a sash window facing the garden gives a good view below of the remains of the large archway which may mark the entrance to an original coach house and has already been seen on the ground floor. At the eastern extremity of this corridor we come to a narrow oak staircase to the second floor which we will examine later.
We return once more to the landing and facing north we notice that a short flight of six steps takes us to the mezzanine floor. This short flight of steps with oak balusters and hand rail matching those of the main staircase which we climbed earlier, leads to a small landing. This was the upper storey to the 1780 extension added by the Rev John Halls. It was raised as a mezzanine floor to give extra height to the imposing Dining Room below, and its flanking Library to the west, and the kitchen and scullery areas to the east. The narrow landing at this level has three rooms opening from it and these were perhaps bedrooms five, six and seven. All the mouldings around these doorways copy the design of those in the rooms below and have a lighter more delicate touch typical of the Adam style.
If we pause at the top of the six steps and look backwards and upwards we see an unusual feature at the level of the second floor. Here an arched, glazed doorway, protected on its lower half by an oak balustrade, conceals a cast-iron furniture hoist.
This was obviously in position before the 1780 extension and was used to hoist large pieces of furniture to the first and second floors. Just below it as a decorative feature a fine piece of running dog moulding in dark oak completes the picture. Here also we get a closer and very fine view of the underside of the dome with its mouldings and fan-shaped decoration springing from a cluster of acanthus leaves.
The centre room on the mezzanine floor has as its entrance a pair of double-panelled doors with delicate fern-shaped mouldings on either side. The whole doorway is surmounted by an enormous moulded shell-shaped fan. Entering this centre room it is immediately obvious that the external doorway mouldings are more elaborate than the internal features. There are no mouldings at the coving or dado rail, and very sadly at some stage between 1956 when the County High School left and 1966 when adult education took over, the fireplace was robbed out. All that remains is a pale marble surround suggesting that at an earlier stage something more elaborate had existed. Certainly former pupils of CCHS from the 1920s and 30s can recall having fire-stoking duties when an open fire was used for heating the room. The size of this room however is impressive – very slightly smaller than the former Dining Room below it on the ground floor. Double full-length glazed doors occupy the centre of the bow window and are flanked on each side by a smaller half-height window. The central glazed doors open onto a balcony which runs externally round the full extent of the bow. These three windows seem contradictory to the main style of the house for they are pointed in the Gothic style with a hint of tracery at the apex. The Gothic phase was a C14th form of architecture but was popular in the C19th when there was a vigorous revival. The Robert Adam style in which this extension was built in 1780 did however use elements of Gothic architecture to lighten the neo-classical features. Robert Adam was also very fond of ‘ribbon’ mouldings in some of his internal features such as shown by the decoration on the edges of the ground floor former library’s fireplace.
The external balcony has a balustrade made of scrolled wrought iron and suggests again that this grandeur is more in keeping with a reception room of a ‘piano mobile’ which may have acted as a viewing area for the garden and the activities on the lawn below, rather than just being a bedroom. This room was used as the bursary of the Adult Community College.
Leaving this room and walking down a short corridor to the west under an archway, the door in front of us (with a window over) leads into a lavatory. In the days of Colchester County High School there was a Victorian lavatory pan here decorated with blue flowers and birds similar to the one already described previously in the identical space immediately below on the ground floor. A similar one is displayed in the Dick Joice Museum at Holkham Hall, Norfolk.
The panelling in this area of the mezzanine floor again has a hollow sound which would seem to indicate that the narrow staircase outside the former Library below, and which appeared to end at the height of the Library balcony, in fact once continued to the mezzanine floor and was perhaps a second servants’ service staircase from the Butler’s Pantry which once occupied the space over the spot where the Victorian toilet was added. Another bedroom closet may also have been here.
The door to the north adjoining the lavatory leads into bedroom number six. This is the same size as the room below and was the Vice-Principal’s room in the Adult Community College. It has an identical Venetian window to the Library undecorated on the inside, but decorated with pilasters on the outside. There are few mouldings in this room, but the fireplace flanked by cupboards with panelled doors each side is the most distinguishing feature although it lacks its cast-iron grate. It has a surround of white marble and the architrave is carved with very typical Adam style designs. A carved urn in the centre, similar to the library, supports two carved floral swags attached to carved supports at each end. Again, during adult college days, the cupboard doors were picked out in Adam-style sky blue and white.
The final bedroom, which is number seven, is at the east end of the mezzanine floor, slightly larger than bedroom six but decoratively almost identical. This was the Adult Community College’s Principal’s room. It has a Venetian window identical to bedroom six and a fireplace of the same size. It is immediately over the kitchen and scullery areas on the ground floor. The fireplace surround is of black marble, but the back plate and grate have long since disappeared. Below the mantelshelf is a central white marble keystone with a single carved urn in relief on a separate piece of marble – a motif repeated again and again throughout Robert Adam’s designs and once more possibly signifying an association with the river gods.
With a final glance upward at the spectacular dome which we shall not see again from the inside on our tour, we descend the six steps from the mezzanine floor and turn eastwards along the corridor to the small staircase at the far (east) end ready to climb it to the second floor.
So much more in the printed book …
The book contains a full set of illustrations and diagrams, plus reminiscences, anecdotes and additional information.
See the Resources section for a fully illustrated guided tour downloadable leaflet.