This old place doesn’t give up its secrets easily!

Features that I thought might have been original, aren’t, but it took some working out.

I was delighted to see that the old decorative plaster surround was still intact when I bought the place. I was convinced it was an original feature, as was my brother (who knows a bit about these things), but alas no, it isn’t. At least, it may be from the period, but has definitely been added later.
It’s certainly from a period in the 1800’s judging by the design, and I was told it probably housed a mirror, or a painting of some kind.

Plasterwork arch above what was once a chimney place

This room, the dining room and the rooms on the other side of the partition, (the kitchen? and the back-kitchen), weren’t always divided up like that.
Now the partitions are no more, I think these rooms were just one big dining room.

The clues started appearing after the area underneath this plasterwork piece was knocked in. It was hollow, so had to be a void or an old chimney place.
The positioning of this piece always seemed a little awkward to me – it wasn’t placed symmetrically between the beams, nor centralized on the wall.
So it appeared that this lovely piece of plaster architecture was an overmantel, for a fireplace underneath. And indeed, thats probably what it was, but only after the owners had decided to divide the room up probably 100 years after the house had been built.

The deciding clues came quickly. I was like a bloodhound on the trial to the truth!

Further investigation showed that the fireplace stones (at the back of the chimney against the wall) weren’t symmetrical with the chimney breast either, and that they extended to the left behind what I thought was another original feature, a nice lockable oak cupboard set into the wall. That isn’t original either!
Looking closely in the back of the cupboard there are in fact the same flat stones that are found in the chimney place. They’ve been painted over, but are exactly the same shape.

The original chimney place probably looked something like this

So all-in-all a pretty little masquerade!

Having thought about it, I think this is a highly likely possibility:
The big room was divided up. Why? When the house was built in 1769 the kitchen wouldn’t ever have been in the main house. Remember that the house adjoining, was part of the grand scheme of things back then, so the cooking was probably done there and brought into the big house for serving.
When the house was divided up in the early 1900’s, it wouldn’t have had a kitchen but would then have needed one, so the big old dining room was split into two, a new dining room on the right with its altered chimney layout and oak cupboard, and a kitchen on the left with another chimney place (which I also thought was original, but isn’t!)

If you start with these assumptions, the rest falls into place easily.
The original big mostly-covered-up fireplace in the old dining room, is in exactly the same mirrored position as the one that would have been in the sitting room opposite. Ive knocked that one in too. Both are set symmetrically between the ceiling beams, same widths of 1700mm and same heights of 1000mm.

A bonus too.
Attached to some old masonry in the dining room fireplace was a piece of the old original fire surround.
It was in black and grey marble with white veining. Oddly there are bits around the house of the same marble – I found several bits beside the fig tree on the small terrace, so I now have an idea of what I should be replacing them with, when it comes to the renovation.