Walter Clifford had built it for a curate, who proved a bird of passage, and the said Walter had a horror of low rooms, for he said, "I always feel as if the ceiling was going to flatten me to the floor." Owing to this the bedroom windows, which looked westward on the garden, were a great height from the ground, and the building had a Gothic character.
Still there was much to justify the term cottage.

The door, which looked southward on the road, was at the side of the building, and opened, not into a hall, but into the one large sitting-room, which was thirty feet long and twenty-five feet broad, and instead of a plaster ceiling there were massive joists, which Hope had gilded and painted till they were a sight to behold.

Another cottage feature: the walls were literally clothed with verdure and color; in front, huge creeping geraniums, jasmine, and Virginia creepers hid the brick-work; and the western walls, to use the words of a greater painter than ourselves, were "Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine." In the next place, the building stood in a genuine cottage garden.

It was close to the road.

The southern boundary was plain oak paling, made of upright pieces which Hope had varnished so that the color was now a fine amber; the rest of the boundary was a quick-set hedge, in the western division of which stood an enormous oak-tree, hollow at the back.