267, High Street

This is a late 18th century hotel, later used as a school and now a private house, built around 1850. It is constructed from ashlar sandstone and coursed magnesian limestone, with a Welsh slate roof. The building is two storeys and has three bays by three windows on three symmetrical facades. The eastern side adjoins numbers 269 and 271 on High Street. The design is in an Italianate style.

The front entrance has a plinth and channel-rustication to the ground floor, with quoin strips at each end. Stone steps lead to a part-glazed, double-door, sheltered by a triangular hood with panelled pilasters and side lights. Above, there are three round-arched windows with a continuous impost band. The outer windows have blind fanlights, and the arches are rusticated with pointed extrados. The central first-floor window has four-pane sashes and a frieze with raised blocks and a cornice. A later ground-floor addition exists in Bay 1, mirroring the window in Bay 3, and bracketed eaves overhang a hipped roof with a transverse ridge stack to the front projection, and corniced end stacks.

The rear of the building features rusticated pilasters flanking a round-arched central doorway and windows on each side. Above is a corbelled balcony with an ashlar balustrade to three windows. The outer bays have apron panels with crosses below the round-arched, two-light windows. Corbelled oriel-bay windows are positioned above, featuring blind, latticed apron panels to segmentally-arched, two-light windows, with friezes with lozenges and cornices.

The left return has a door and window, each with a fanlight and round arch. Recessed, segmental-headed first-floor windows are linked by a sill band. The central window has an apron panel and is set beneath a blind window with rusticated round arch on a continuous impost string course. Dummy attic windows to the outer bays have panelled aprons and margin glazing. The central bay is gabled and has an apex stack with two flues linked by a keyed round arch and a cornice detail.

The interior has an altered stone staircase. A large first-floor room across the rear includes a contemporary fireplace at the east end. The building was initially constructed as a hotel with baths and assembly rooms, built over a natural spring discovered around 1850. The hotel company subsequently went bankrupt, and the building operated as the Victoria and Albert Bath Hotel before becoming a lodging house and then Wharfedale College, a boys’ school.