IT IS remarkable how even quite modest farmhouses can survive unaltered over three centuries. Fulvens House (previously Fulvens Farm) stands on an idyllic site in the Surrey Hills, the epitome of the British idea of home, with a straight path to the front door and tall chimneys announcing large hearths for blazing log fires.

Between Dorking and Guildford runs a necklace of enchanting villages nestling under steep, rounded hills. Fulvens, until 1918 a farm of 130 acres, stands beside the road going south out of the delightfully named village of Abinger Hammer, with its splendid clock. It is one of a fascinating group of so-called Artisan houses, which have interesting Classical details but appear to be the work of master bricklayers rather than architects. Another is the nearby Crossways Farm, which inspired George Meredith’s 1885 novel Diana of the Crossways.

Pevsner’s Buildings of England rates Fulvens as “one of the best farms in Surrey” and dates it to the middle of the 17th century. The present owners like to quote the story of a builder who is said to have found the date 1628 on a beam. The beauty of the house lies in its almost flawless pink brickwork, a textbook example of Flemish bond ( see box). One wonders at first whether the two-storey porch could be a later addition, but the brickwork is a perfect match and narrow central porches are a frequent feature at this date, a leftover from the Elizabethan E-plan. All the windows have distinctive splayed brick heads which fan out to the side. The archway to the porch has a hood mould of round bricks – rather worn but never restored. Above is a lovely little triangular pediment made with more shaped bricks, em-belished with dentils formed of little bricks the size of a match-box. An extra flourish is provided by an S-shaped iron tie over an upstairs window. The windows retain leaded panes in the original stout wooden mullions. The venerable front door is formed of broad planks with blacksmith’s hinges and bolts and a splendid wooden lockbox more than a foot long.

The preservation of the interior seems to be thanks to a respectful repair apparently carried out by the Edwardian architect Basil Procter, working in the 1920s for the famed county cricketer Alexander Webbe, who batted for Harrow, Oxford and Middle-sex, and his wife Peroline.

The excitement is to find that inside the fashionable brick walls the builders reverted to timber-frame construction. It must have been Procter who exposed the beautifully preserved timbers in virtually every room. They form big 3ft squares, presumably infilled with lath and plaster, or possibly brick, behind the plaster.

The doors are the 17th-cen-tury kind, well-planed vertical oak boards with serpentine moulding down the middle. The hall windows have deep polished oak sills and original shutters. They cover only the lower part of the windows, as on Cape Dutch houses. In a few places handsome replica doors ensure a perfect match.

The staircase forms an unexpectedly broad, easy ascent with polished treads and open posts providing a view of the returning flight. The house plan is simple, with three main rooms per floor and a study at the back. An alcove preserves a fine group of early blue-and-white Delft-style tiles. The bedrooms and attics all have impressive exposed timbers and broad-planked floors.

Webbe died in his eighties in 1941 and his widow sold home-grown vegetables from the yard. There is a very pretty tile-hung barn to the south, given style by a large oriel window in the tall barn door, with mullions echoing those of Fulvens. (In the 1960s new owners sold it as a separate house.) After Webbe, Fulvens was bought by a physicist, Dr Bernard Crowther, who worked with Rutherford at Cambridge on radar during the Second World War. He was the brother of Lord Crowther, editor of The Economist.

The property comes with two acres of gardens. There is an impressive yew hedge, with a clipped archway. Beyond, a stream meanders through a wild garden. The hill behind the house is planted as a spring garden and leads on to hill walks. Two additional lots of some 22 acres are available, with water meadows. Price: £1.6 million, through Jackson-Stops & Staff, 01306 887560

FACT FILE

A header is a brick laid so that only the end appears on the face of the wall. A stretcher is a brick laid with only the side visible. The English bond found on Tudor buildings consists of alternative rows of headers and stretchers. From the late 16th century, this gave way to Flemish bond, where headers and stretchers alternate.

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