Putting on the style
If you would like to be exclusive, build yourself a crinkle-crankle wall. To comply with historic standards it will have to be over six feet high, built of any brick, local or imported, and set on sound footings. Most importantly of all it must extend along a straight axis, but in a serpentine fashion of graceful, not over-stated, curves. It is thought that there are less than seventy crinkle-crankle walls surviving in the whole of Britain, and forty-five of them are in Suffolk. So to be fairly assured of achieving exclusivity it might be better to live somewhere like the Isle of Lewes.
Ever keen to go for a compromise, my example is within a pencil-line of the Suffolk-Norfolk border. Augustus House is the administrative home of a commercial company, and over the days I spent working on its history I felt that its name very much reflected its attitude to its clients. My first crinkle-crankle wall was close by the Green at Long Melford in Suffolk, and Jim Allen, at that time regional foreman-of-works for Ancient Monuments, a master craftsman in all building skills, told me that serpentine walls have two distinct advantages over straight walls. The repetition of the curves added strength to the height-length ratio, producing a form of buttressing, and that south-facing walls held a considerable amount of heat in their bays. Certainly, I subsequently discovered on visits to other sites that most of these walls were in kitchen gardens and others, often associated with gardens growing exotic plants.
To date all the walls were built around the late 18th century. I put this wall to close on 1800, contemporary with the front part of the house, (see above). The wall uses local red bricks, whereas the house, needing to be stylishly different to other smart houses in the vicinity, is built in white bricks of boulder clay imported from the Cambridgeshire fens.
The rarely used header bond, where the bricks are laid crosswise to form the width of a wall, can often be found in these serpentine walls, but not here. The photograph shows the Flemish bond with courses of alternating headers and stretchers. The lower part of the wall is neatly laid with seven courses of natural flints forming a plinth. Two trial trenches excavated across the garden’s boundary, where there may have been a similar wall, were dug and successfully found footings of a mixture of rubble bricks and flints. 
The kitchen garden had been created as part of the elaborate, and no doubt expensive, fashionable make-over of Augustus House right at the end of the 18th century. It was the property of a successful Suffolk merchant-farmer who lived in the principal family home, also on the southern edge of the River Waveney, closer to the trading town of Diss. He presented the remodelled house, gardens and park, and the modernised model farm to his unmarried son and two daughters; presumably as an attractive inducement to potential spouses for any one of them.
To an extent the ploy worked. One sister married well, as they say, and left the district, her brother also married and on his father’s death moved into the main family home. The other sister remained a spinster and the local church reveals considerable visual evidence of her generous benefaction throughout much of the 19th century.
The classical south front of Augustus House presents as elegant a welcome to today’s visitors as it did at the close of the 18th century. The symmetrical pattern of the high, dignified windows spaced with care around the centrally placed portico of the doorway is pure elegance. The semi-circular pediment, which crowns the portico provides a balcony for the tripartite Venetian window which, like a French window, opens on to it. In its day the extremely low-pitched roof, with its sloping hips at each end, would have compounded the house’s modernity and status, even though the approach from either side would have given indications of the earlier house that lurked behind the front range.
At the back, viewed from the east side, is a second range with a steep roof, that has been given a hipped end to match the front range. This makes the house double-span or two rooms wide. The west side shows a crosswing extending at a right-angle from this double-span, all of which means that this L-shaped house is at least early 17th century.
Although Augustus House is now 21st century business premises, with all the functional requirements for international communication and logistical operation, it is not difficult to see the house that was built for three young upwardly mobile persons two hundred years ago. It is equally easy to discover that the older house it was added to is much older than the 17th century date suggested from the exterior. In the late 1400s it was a grand Tudor mansion. The commercial furniture slid from my view and I was bowled over by the sheer elegant delight of the staircase, the refined plasterwork throughout, and the amount of remarkable timberwork, beams, vertical studs and arched braces that were so evident at all levels throughout the house. It is a lesson to architects and designers how earlier features might be saved and continue to enhance an old building. This house truly lives up to its name: august does indeed mean exalted and impressive.
