Two rooms under the beams
The two sitting rooms at Lavengro are side by side in the old part of the house, each with a wide open brick fireplace, chamfered beams overhead and windows to the front and back gardens. The cottage is timber framed, rendered and thatched, and Historic England dates it to the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Historic England listed the house at Grade II on 14 January 1985, at Lower East End in Furneux Pelham. Its entry describes the timber frame, the render and the thatch, one story with attics, two dormers, an axial chimney stack and a gable stack, a single-story bay to the east and modern additions. It names no builder.
What the plan holds
The front door opens to a hall that keeps its original brick floor. On one side are the two sitting rooms, each 14 feet 11 inches deep, and a study lined with books that has its own door to the garden. On the other side, in a newer extension under a clay-tile roof, the kitchen measures 15 feet 3 inches by 13 feet 10 inches and is open to the timber trusses, with cream-painted cabinets, granite counters and a range cooker. A utility room and a shower room sit behind it, and a snug off the hall doubles as a third bedroom.
Upstairs, two bedrooms are reached by separate staircases, with hardwood floorboards, dormer windows and curved timbers. The principal bedroom has built-in cupboards and its own bathroom, with a freestanding roll-top bath.
A quarter acre
The garden is a quarter of an acre, enclosed by mature trees and hedges, with a cottage garden at the front, flowering beds at the back, a pond and a greenhouse. A thatched garden room, octagonal on the plan, has an elm floor, electricity and wifi.
The name is also the title of George Borrow's 1851 novel, Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest, and the listing calls that a fortuitous namesake. The village pub, The Brewery Tap, stands opposite the site of the brewery William Rayment built in 1860, which closed in 1987.
