West Wood St Dunstan

West Wood St Dunstan is a large house built around 1902 by the architect W H Romaine-Walker for himself. It stands on the south side of West Street in Mayfield.

The building is constructed with coursed squared sandstone to the ground floor and pebbledashed rendering to the first floor above a moulded timber bressummer. The roof is of renewed tile with brick chimneys. The plan is U-shaped and open on the south-east garden side, with a side service wing (outshut) on the west side. The house is two storeys high, arranged in five bays with a one-bay side outshut.

The design exemplifies the Arts and Crafts style. Key architectural features include Tudor-arched doorways with decorative spandrels and nail-studded board doors with cover strips; wooden mullioned windows with transoms on the ground floor, featuring leaded casements with decorative catches and some containing reset stained or painted glass medallions, some bearing 17th-century dates; visible rafter ends at the eaves; and ribbed and corniced clustered chimney stacks.

The garden elevation is particularly distinctive. The first floor is jettied, and gables display decorative open-work bargeboards and finials with pendants. The main range of three bays has four-light bay windows in the angles with wings and a six-light central window, with a continuous window to the first floor. The left wing is taller and longer than the right wing, each having four-light windows to both floors of the gable end. The right wing has a door to its inner return, while the left wing features a four-light bay window, a door, and on the first floor two three-light windows set in gables; the right gable has bird holes. To the left of the left wing is a formerly open-fronted loggia, now glazed as a conservatory with restored wooden framework supporting the roof. Each wing and the main range have chimney stacks rising to their ridges.

The rear entrance elevation features a projecting jettied gabled left bay with three-light windows to each floor. The next two bays have a fire-back projection with offset top, a one-light window with old glass to the far right, and two four-light flat-roofed dormers. Gabled bay 4 has a three-light first-floor window but is largely masked by a two-storey gabled porch. The porch has an upper part to the ground floor which was originally open but is now glazed, fitted with turned balusters and a two-light window to the gable, and features a doorway to the left return with a decorative arch containing a pineapple pendant and grotesques; an internal door is flanked by side-lights. Bay 5 has a one-light window, and the brick outshut has a round-arched doorway. The right return features a flat-roofed four-light bay window to the left and a three-light window to the right, with a central two-light window on the first floor below a gable. The left return, comprising the side outshut, is of brick with various small-pane wooden casement windows and flat-roofed dormers; one curious dormer in a tile-hung half-gable abuts a tall chimney on the left, and another sits in a pebbledashed gable near the top of the roof.

The interior survives in good quality condition and includes panelled doors and window reveals, fireplaces with tile or marble surrounds, architraves and metal grates, and tiled bathrooms with original baths.

The sitting room is executed in Jacobean style with panelling featuring low-relief-decorated pilasters topped with lions' heads, a modillion cornice, a running-pomegranate plaster frieze, and a decorative plaster ceiling with panels containing flora and fauna reliefs and pendants. The stone fireplace displays low-relief-decorative flanking pilasters and columns which support an entablature. A Jacobean-style wooden stair rises from the sitting room, with balusters forming arched panels, relief-decorated finialled newels, and a late 18th-century-style balustrade to the first-floor landing.

The dining room retains walls hung with original tapestry, bolection-moulded architraves, an elaborate fireplace, and a coved ceiling.

In the principal bedroom, cupboards flanking the fireplace have delicate metalwork fronts.

This is a high-quality Arts and Crafts house designed by a major society architect of the period. From 1956 to 1986 it was the home of General Glubb (Glubb Pasha).