Windlestone Hall

Windlestone Hall

House, formerly a County Council residential school, which closed in 2006. The building is a circa 1835 rebuilding of a 16th-century house, designed by Ignatius Bonomi for Sir Robert Johnson Eden, Baronet. It is said to incorporate part of a rear wing rebuilt around 1750, with a billiard room added in the second half of the 19th century. The main structure is constructed of ashlar sandstone, reputed to have come from Gatherley Moor in the North Riding; the rear service wing is rendered with ashlar dressings. The roofs are covered with thick light grey slates, not visible from the front. The plan is a long U-shape.

The main range faces east and is two storeys high, with a facade of twelve bays arranged as 3:1:3:2:3. A one-storey, two-bay billiard-room block projects forward at the right end. The first seven bays are treated symmetrically, featuring a projecting balustraded smooth Doric colonnade with triglyph frieze on a stylobate. The wide central bay projects further and is tetrastyle with paired columns in the flanking bays. Behind the colonnade are aproned sashes, with three lights in the central bay. The eighth and ninth bays are recessed and have the colonnade continuing the main building line with frieze but no balustrade; steps lead up to double doors with long flanking sashes. First-floor sashes are aproned, with wide pilasters flanking a window over the central colonnade projections. The three right bays have similar windows on both floors, with the upper sashes positioned at floor level on a band continuing from the colonnade cornice. All sashes have fine glazing bars and plain reveals. A roof balustrade continues around the returns, with bays two, three, seven and eight projecting; statues are positioned in niches in the first bay. The left return features a large apse. The billiard room, similar in style to the main building, has a projecting square bay at the left and a half-glazed door at the right; its roof balustrade has ball finials. A high corniced wall at the right conceals a pent extension on the right return, with a hipped roof.

The rear elevation of the main block has steps leading up to a half-glazed door under a bracketed hood. The rear service wing, extending along the long arm of the U, has two-light windows in Tudor style.

The interior contains a small entrance hall with elaborate stucco ceiling decoration in the same style as that over the main staircase. This leads to a long passage which opens southward into a full-height hall. Two pairs of Ionic columns, finished in porphyry-like scagliola, are positioned east towards the garden and north towards the stair. These support a classical frieze with low-relief scenes in the style of the Parthenon, with marbled panels filling the upper walls. The ceiling has two glazed domes on guilloche-moulded drums, with stucco coats of arms between them. A glazed partition on the east side possibly indicates that this location was originally intended to be the main entrance, with a change made at an early stage of planning. On the north, an Imperial stair features two slender diabolo balusters per tread and turned newels supporting a ramped handrail; its richly-decorated panelled ceiling bears the initials 'RJE, WE AND RE'.

A library opens from the south of the hall and has a veneered fascia over bookcases, with shelves now lost, and a slender brass balustrade to a balcony in front of upper cases. Dummy books conceal an entrance to the upper level. The room contains a 18th-century-style marble chimneypiece. Most doors are six-panelled, set in panelled reveals with architraves. Many original chimneypieces remain throughout.

The north apse contains a cantilevered stair with cast-iron balustrade. A room to the north-west of the main hall, now the kitchen but probably formerly a drawing room, has a change of floor level. Its coved ceiling has rococo-style stucco decoration, probably dating to the 19th century, featuring central swirling acanthus leaves, coving with baskets of flowers, thick trails of flowers, oak-leaf and other classical mouldings, shells and brackets; this is partly obscured by the insertion of ducts from ovens. The billiard room has stucco decoration on its coved ceiling in Jacobean style with strapwork panels. 17th-century panelling, transferred by the Eden family from their house at West Auckland, is now in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle.

A 20th-century rear addition is not of architectural interest.