Dunwood Hall, Entrance Steps And Urns

This is a late 19th-century house, dated 1871, designed by Robert Scrivener for Thomas Hulme, a local potter. The house is built in a High Gothic style and roughly ‘L’ shaped, with a radial plan extending from a central hall. It is constructed of rock-faced stone with smooth yellow sandstone dressings and quoins, topped with a slate roof. Decorative cast iron ridges, verge parapets, cast iron guttering imitating decorated eaves, and a side stack to the front, along with an end stack to the right, are noteworthy features.

The house is two storeys with an attic, and includes a higher three-storey entrance tower to the right of the centre, dividing the frontage into two parts. The left portion features slightly higher eaves, with a projecting side stack and a single range of windows nestled between the stack and tower. A gabled half-dormer with 'Y'-tracery sits over two stone, chamfered mullion and transom windows.

The projecting tower porch has a truncated and crested hipped roof, a heavily moulded cornice with gargoyles at the angles above a quatrefoil-medallioned frieze, and raised strings at floor levels. The top stage of the porch features three grouped pointed narrow lights, flanked by shields bearing Thomas Hulme’s coat-of-arms and the inscription "TH/1871." The doorway is elaborately arched with a moulded intrados, shafts with foliated capitals, a half-glazed door with cast iron decoration and trefoil-headed side-lights and overlight incorporating trefoils and quatrefoils in the tympanum. A fleur-de-lys finial tops the porch.

Large, elaborately carved, egg-cup-shaped urns flank the entrance steps. The right-hand portion of the house is set back with a single-light pointed-arch window to the left of the first floor against the tower, followed by a range of windows offset to the right, topped with a gabled dormer window featuring a pointed relieving arch and an inset cinquefoil in the tympanum, over two chamfered mullion and transom, three-light windows.

Inside, the entrance leads through a vestibule to a glazed inner entrance screen in the central hall, which is extensively toplit. A first-floor gallery features cast iron balustrading. A patterned encaustic tile floor of Minton is present, along with a columnated granite and stone fireplace, and a heavy, turned-baluster staircase offset beyond the hall to the south. Elaborate fleuron cornices adorn the rooms to the south of the hall.