Woodhouse Hall

Woodhouse Hall

A house built around 1740 for Christopher Thompson, later used as judges' lodgings and an art school, now a hospital staff residence. The building was subsequently altered around 1840, probably by John Clark, with interior alterations and decoration carried out in 1847 by William Reid Corson and Edward la Trobe Bateman to designs by Owen Jones, possibly for the heirs of John Atkinson. The building was restored around 1980.

The structure is constructed of red brick with stone dressings and a slate roof. It comprises 2 and 3 storeys over a basement. The east-facing entrance façade is 5 bays, while the south-facing garden front is 8 bays.

The east front features quoins and a set of steps rising to a 6-panel door located in bay 4, with an overlight in an architrave. A pillared porch with entablature, cornice and pierced parapet forms a balcony to the window above, also set within an architrave with cornice. The remaining windows are contained in architraves with a first-floor sill band; all windows have 20th-century frames. A modillion eaves cornice runs along the top, with a hipped roof and a stack to the rear left.

The left return and south garden front comprise a 3-storey, 4-bay plain façade with single and paired windows set in stone architraves. A 20th-century stair window is positioned to the left. Flanking this are shallow projecting 2-storey canted bays—the left with plain architraves and the right with corniced architraves. A 2-storey wing with quoins and corniced architraves, measuring 1 bay by 5 bays, was added to the right.

The interior features a main door opening into a corridor that leads to a circular domed staircase hall. This hall is paved with mosaic in blues, browns and yellow in a geometric pattern featuring an 8-pointed star, concentric circles and panels with Greek motifs. The staircase has a cast-iron balustrade decorated with scrolls and flowers and a ramped handrail. At the west end of the house, the plaster decoration and round-arched niche of the 18th-century staircase hall survive, though the stairs were rebuilt.

The 3-storey range facing south was originally the manor house of the hamlet of Little Woodhouse. In 1740 it was described as 'a new house empty' and was available to let with 8 or 18 acres of land in 1741. In 1793 the distiller Thomas Coupland purchased the property; he went bankrupt in 1822 and the hall was sold to John Atkinson, a leading solicitor in the town, who died in 1833. Alterations to the hall were supervised by John Clark for Atkinson's co-heirs, his two sons, who lived at Waverley House, Woodhouse Square, from 1840. Corson and Bateman were pupils of Owen Jones, the leading authority on polychromy in architecture and a friend of Joseph Bonomi, who was designing the Temple Mills, Marshall Street in 1838-40. Six lunettes painted for the staircase hall by John Everett Millais are held in the collection of Leeds City Art Gallery. In 1855 William Hey, surgeon, sold the hall to the city as a Judges' Lodging, after which he moved to No. 20 Clarendon Road. The hall subsequently became part of the Art College and by 1973 was divided into 6 apartments. It is now the property of Leeds Hospital Authority.