Seaham Hall Hotel

Seaham Hall Hotel is a country house, built between 1791 and 1792 for Sir Ralph Milbanke, with additions made in 1861 by Lewis Vulliamy for Frances, Lady Londonderry. The exterior is of incised rendered rubble, painted white, with Welsh slate roofs and rendered and pebble-dashed chimneys. The design is classical in style. The long, two-story garden front is symmetrical, with a nine-bay centre and projecting bays to the left. Flanking wings extend further to the left and right. A continuous plinth and a band are painted black between the two stories. Replacement doors and primarily six- and twelve-pane sash windows are present. The nine-bay central section has a tall, gabled projecting bay with a two-story canted bay window and a round-headed light within a wooden open-pedimented gable. The bays on either side have a central square bay window on the ground floor. The left bay has a tripartite window on the ground floor and a hipped roof behind a parapet. The left wing has an altered doorway and a roof with a coped left gable. The right wing has end doors and a similar square bay window, with a narrower projecting bay under a hipped roof, an eaves cornice, and a hipped main roof. Conjoined, square-plan ridge stacks are visible. A two-story, nine-bay block forms the centre rear. The entrance front features a projecting three-bay centre with a six-panel double door set behind a tetrastyle Tuscan portico. Further details include sunk panels, a string course, twelve-pane sashes, twentieth-century casements, elongated sashes on the ground floor to the right, an eaves cornice, and a low-pitched hipped roof with ridge stacks. Flanking irregular two-story ranges are present with scattered sashes and hipped roofs. The interior has been extensively altered. The original upstairs Drawing Room, the location of Lord Byron’s marriage, retains a marble chimney-piece, six-panel doors in architraves, and an enriched cornice. Other rooms designed by Lewis Vulliamy include an Entrance Hall with recessed round-arched wall panels, a large Staircase Hall featuring a cantilevered staircase with ornamental cast-iron balusters, round corridor archways, a modillion cornice, and a glazed ceiling, a Dining Room and a Drawing Room with moulded skirtings, dado rails, six-panel doors, and enriched cornices. The Drawing Room retains a wood chimney-piece with barley-sugar columns. In the upstairs Drawing Room, on 2nd January 1815, Lord Byron married Anne Isabella Milbanke, and "The Siege of Corinth" and part of "The Hebrew Melodies" were written at Seaham Hall.