Montague House

Montague House is a circa 1830s house, which was later used as a school and converted into apartments in 2003. It was remodelled and extended in the late 19th century. The house is constructed of stuccoed exterior with slate hipped roofs, lead rolls to hips and ridges, deep eaves, and rendered axial stacks.

The original plan comprises a central five-bay house from the 1830s with large, later 19th-century extensions to the west and east, and a verandah across the south front. The western extension created a new five-bay entrance front facing west, featuring a central porch within an Italianate tower. A large late 20th-century school addition to the east is not included in the listing.

The original central house is symmetrical with two storeys and a 2:1:2 bay arrangement, exhibiting rusticated pilasters, a band, moulded architraves, twelve-pane first-floor sash windows, tall fifteen-pane ground-floor sashes with low cills, and a central doorway with a moulded architrave and a glazed panelled door. A tented verandah is positioned across the ground floor, supported by thin wooden posts. The later extension to the right incorporates two storeys and an attic, with 1:2:1 bays, rusticated quoins, moulded architraves, cambered arches, and a balustrade below the attic windows. The extension to the left includes a canted bay on the south end and a five-bay west front with a central, three-storey Italianate tower featuring a bracketed hipped roof with a finial, a Venetian attic window, a porch with a round arch and columns in antis, and sashes within moulded architraves; ground-floor sashes have cambered arches. The rear (north) elevation presents hipped roof wings and a squat tower.

The interior, remodelled in the late 19th century, retains many original features of that period, including a cantilevered staircase with a cast-iron balustrade, moulded modillion ceiling cornices, moulded doorframes and panelled doors, moulded arches, pilasters and imposts, elaborate chimneypieces with overmantels, bookcases, and ribbed ceilings. A room within the west wing features a Jacobethan carved wooden chimneypiece, overmantel, wainscot, sideboard, niches, overdoors, a ribbed plaster ceiling, a moulded cornice, and a painted frieze.