Cliffe Castle (Museum)

Cliffe Castle (Museum) is a large house built between 1875 and 1878, and with the top storey removed in the 1950s. It was designed by George Smith of Bradford for a local manufacturer. The house is constructed of ashlar and is in a High Victorian style. It is two storeys high. Windows are mullioned and transomed, or single-light, with sashes and quoined surrounds.

The front of the house is dominated by a four-storey tower with a round-arched, embattled porte cochere featuring off-set angle buttresses, a corbelled parapet, and relief sculpture and tracery. The tower features decorated oriel windows to the second floor and is flanked by two-storey bay windows. To the far left is a conservatory with glass doors, a bay window, and a parapet.

At the rear, a tall, single-storey gabled music room projects to the right. The end of the music room is canted and contains a three-light pointed-arch window with transoms, plate tracery, and a hoodmould with floreated terminals, which continues as a stringcourse. Above this window is a shaped pediment with a traceried wheel-window under a hoodmould. There is coping and a dragon finial holding an iron weather-vane. The returns of the music room have embattled parapets, and a lateral stack is on the right return. A 20th-century gallery on the left is not of particular interest.

On the right return are four stepped bays containing two-storey bay windows. The building was formerly gabled, but the top storey has been removed.

The interior includes a porch with a tesselated floor, stained-glass windows, and a coffered ceiling with painting and plasterwork. The entrance hall has moulded and panelled arches. An ornamented staircase features iron and wood balusters, a stained-glass window, a painted wood ceiling with hammerbeams, and Gothic ornament. An octagonal stairwell includes an upper gallery on octagonal piers, an iron rail, and a central lantern. A breakfast room and a conservatory are to the left of the porch; the conservatory has pointed-arch arcades and iron ties to the glass roof. To the right of the porch is a range of music, drawing, dining, and drawing-rooms that retain original decorative features including Adam-style motifs, painted ceilings, roundels, panelling, and fireplaces. The music room, at the rear left, has a parapet floor, decorative frieze, corbelled beams, and a coffered ceiling.

Museum drawings indicate that before the 1950s alterations, the rear of the house included a castellated tower, a round, steepled tower, and a round tower with a cupola (the base of which remains). Only one Dutch gable from the top storey now survives.