Moorfield House

Moorfield House is a large house, built in 1855-56 and restored in 1979-80, located on Alma Road, Headingley, Leeds. It was designed for William Glover Joy and is constructed of coursed squared gritstone with ashlar detailing, topped with an ornate slate roof featuring a fish-scale pattern. The house is in the Tudor Gothic Revival style.

The main facade faces east and has six first-floor windows, with a projecting canted bay containing a single-storey porch, which may be an addition. The porch has a four-centred arch doorway, with three cusped lights above, set within an architrave carved with crouching dogs and a deep hoodmould featuring male and female heads in the stops. Octagonal corner turrets rise above the porch to a cornice with traceried panels, topped by tall, ogee domes with crocketed finials and linked by an embattled parapet with a small gable above a central plaque displaying a shield. The main range has tall windows with restored cross frames and hoodmoulds, a moulded string course, and an embattled parapet. An octagonal spire rises above the entrance bay. Tall Tudor-style chimneys feature two or three octagonal shafts each. The tower on the right has Gothic traceried ground-floor windows, a machicolated and embattled parapet with gargoyles, and an attached octagonal stair turret with a short spire.

Inside, the hall has stone cusped arches supported by polished granite columns, and wrought-iron balusters to the open-well staircase. There is a Gothic Revival vaulted octagonal chapel, along with rooms featuring Tudor arched panelling and ceilings with pendants.

The house has a history connected to the Glover Joy family, who lived there from 1856 to 1877. Later occupants included Samuel Smith, a tanner and currier, and the Joy family again. It was subsequently occupied by John Carr Nicholson, a dry salter and manufacturing chemist, and then Elsie Thackrah, who established the Moorfield House Missionary College in 1936. During World War II (1939-44), the building served as wartime administration offices for the Secretary of State for Air. From 1944 to 1973 it was used as regional offices by the Automobile Association, with additions to the rear. In 1979, the property was extensively refurbished and is now occupied by Fletcher Joseph, an architectural partnership. The house features stop-chamfered spine beams with run-out stops.