Renaming a terrible house name

[ChristmasCrumpet]

Just a bit of a silly one as it may come to nothing, but we've seen a house we like....that's currently aesthetically awful but tonnes of potential.

It's large, detached 3000sqft. Stands in an acre. 16th C but been extended and extended. The outside is covered in mock Tudor beams, painted chocolate brown with a yellow background. We'd take off all the mock diamond lead stuck on the windows, and paint it nicely! It's a big imposing lump, and I like that.

The owners have named it (very similar to) Lance Lodge. It's not a lodge. And Lance is bloody awful.

We'd rename it 'Something' House.

What would you replace 'Something' with? What sounds like a nice, strong, impressive, clean, welcoming name?

I don't like the usual suspects...Crown House. White House. (Although we'd probably paint it mainly white TBF.) Oak House. All are a bit uninspired, one in every village.

I quite like Alexander House, but DH thinks it's just odd to pick a random name, I just think it flows.

Looking for hive mind inspiration!

(I've been looking on Rightmove at house names, there's genuinely one for sale called Chez Wedrewolf. Yes really. And no, I don't like Wedrewolf House )

Foxhat house....
play on words, you say it's hard to find, someone might say 'where the fuck's that'...... 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I know someone who found out after moving in that their house was named Screaming Blue Murder

I can't find anything out (on just Google, which is the level of research I'm entertaining at the mo) other than the tiny 16th C part is clergy related, and there was a huge discovery of Roman graves nearby (so I'm presuming the ones in the garden are as well) but the graves could just be relating to the 16th C clergy thing.

I saw a house recently called squirrels leap.
If like fox House, maybe foxglove House and plant some in the garden?

Is there an old surname in your family history you could use? Or a first name that could work?

Could you just call it Fox Field?

Without 'house'?

Or Briarfield/ Foxfield / Briarfox House?

Bramble Field House?

After trees? I like the sound of 'willow house ' but willow tress are my favourite.

Or after birds, kingfisher house, heron house, hawk house, swan house etc

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ you should be able to find your house on here and see if it had any old names.

OP You can buy a copy of the title documents and plan (ie the 'deeds') online, very cheaply. You do not have to be the owner of the property - it's public information, available to all.

If in England or Wales, go to this government website: https://www.gov.uk/search-property-information-land-registry

The same site also has links to similar sources in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Phoenix
Church field house

Where I grew up in the countryside, not only were the houses not numbered, they were not named either, so the address was Person’s Name, Townland Name, Nearest Town/ Village name. The postman needed an encyclopaedic knowledge of who lived where, and to be able to distinguish between two or three John Buttimers who lived in Rossmore.

There's a house with a view of the village of Corfe Castle called "Far Corfe".

My house was named for the woodland that used to surround it and my childhood home for the name of the field it was built in.

Nb. How about "The Foxhole"?

Does it have to be "Something House"? Could it be "The Laurels" or "Dunroamin" or something? Using "House" makes it seem very grand: hospice/flats/council offices/office block.

Foxley House

Foxfields House

I’d agree. A very old house in the village we used to live in had long the name of the adjacent field (an old name that combined the type of tree on the boundary and the fact that the field had access to other fields and would traditionally have been harvested first (‘sic’)), and new people changed the house name to Village Name House, which felt weirdly proprietorial, especially as it wasn’t the manor house.

I actually loathe our house name, but it’s been called that since 1902, when the family who bought it gave it a place name from the wife’s country of origin, which was also her middle name. Plus our very long road uses a mind-bending mixture of different numberings. It’s perfectly usual for 107, X Road to be next door to 1, Y Terrace, X Road. Our house is 86, X Road on the electoral register etc, but also House Name, 3, Z Terrace. Grr.

Foxfields ?

If the current owners named it, what was it called before?

Please just use a bloody number. The number of times I've been driving at night to a cardiac arrest looking for bloody house names that are illegible and mean that you don't have a clue if you are near them! * house on Smith Street, which in evitably is 3 miles long is not an address, it's like naming a village and expecting an ambulance to know where that is.

Sorry, this is a real bugbear of mine.

Some houses do not have a number. One cannot be allocated if there was not one previously.

My mum lives in a village of about 10 houses all in a line along a road. These houses are not numbered and have never been numbered. Each house has a name, so the address is like New Cottage, Anyvillage or Rosedene, Anyvillage. That's what you get when you type the postcode into an address checker. I do get the frustration for the emergency services and people who aren't familiar with the area.

OP I would also advise having a look to see if there is a local history group or family history society in your area, many have facebook groups and similar. You will almost certainly find someone in there who will give really good and appropriate suggestions.

Foxwood... I don't think it's been mentioned already

I absolutely get this frustration ... but, honestly, sometimes it really doesn't help.

I live in a house with a number and no name, in a village where most of the houses have names not numbers.

Predictably, number 1 is nowhere near number 2, and don't even try to work out why number 10 is where it is.

A substantial whack of my post gets mis-delivered, and I have an awful lot of conversations with puzzled delivery drivers to explain where I am. I'm thinking of naming the house something extremely identifying, such as 'the one next to the bloody school'.

I also get a lot of people knocking on my door to ask where number such-and-such is, because we have a visible number on the front of our door so they know we're not it.

I would love it if someone would insist on the whole village being numbered (which happened in my parents' village when I was a child, so most houses have numbers and names). But I also see the case for naming houses if the numbering system isn't doing anything useful.

You can't do that though if you are in a village with no numbers. My mum's house has a name. No numbers. Even if she worked out that she's the 15th house on the road, and called herself '15', in the absence of any other numbers to reference that would be no greater help. Which end of the road is the starting point? Which one is number 1? "Number 15 is in between Rose Cottage and Church House and just down from Bramble villas. "

It would only work if the whole village was assigned numbers at once by the post office (which would be not a bad idea). In the meantime, wouldn't "what 3 words" solve your problem? My mum had an "emergency grid reference" given to her about 30 years ago that could be given to emergency personnel when calling 999, but I think what 3 words would have superceded that now.

A number can indeed be given. Hence some new houses in between old houses are 27a, 44b etc.

Yes @SarahAndQuack my aunt used to live in the far north west of Scotland in a small community where the houses were numbered according to the order in which they were built. Totally random.

I love this and foxgloves are pretty and easy to grow!