Granville House (the former Granville Hotel)

This substantial terrace-turned-hotel was built between 1867 and 1869 to the designs of E.W. Pugin (1834-1875), with numerous later additions and alterations from the late 19th and 20th centuries. The west end was reconstructed in 2004, replacing a wing destroyed in 1940.

Materials and Construction

The building is constructed of stock brick with a slate roof, stone dressings, and balconies. Cast-iron balconies and grilles were added in 1900.

Plan and Layout

The building stands four storeys high, with an attic and basement. The ground floor is raised and colonnaded along Victoria Parade. The east range, built in 1868-69 with two additional floors added in the late 19th century (after 1877), contains the Granville Bar on the south side with access to the Prince Albert Room to the east, and an anteroom and banqueting hall on the north side of this range. The upper floors contain apartments set off central corridors, configured as such in 1947 when the building was converted from a hotel. The main open-well central staircase and lift are positioned at the rear of the main range, with further staircases to the east and west. The basement contains vaulted wine cellars, stores, and workshop or service rooms. In the centre of the south side of the basement is a narrow tunnel excavated from the chalk cliff, which once connected the hotel to the railway station on the seafront.

Exterior

The principal façade presents a dense and robust Gothic Revival composition, with lighter, more ornate classical embellishments dating from 1900. The façade can still be read as a series of distinct grand townhouses as originally intended in 1867. It rises four storeys with an attic and basement, divided by canted, projecting window bays to the first and second floors. Bookending the façade are a pair of gable-fronted bays with buttresses, pierced stone balconies to the third storey, and pointed-arch gable windows comprising a traceried ocular window over a wider casement window. The east end is original; the west was rebuilt in 2004 in a similar style, though with an additional floor integrated.

Pugin's original window arrangement, which remains on the first floor and above, is principally of single and tripartite sashes set under rebated segmental heads. Tripartite full-height sashes and French windows set in moulded and keyed surrounds were introduced in 1900 on the ground floor by Horace Field. A variety of dormer windows feature above. The original part of the mansard roof has two brick gabled half dormers (a third was destroyed in 1940). Flanking these are five Queen Anne style dormers added in 1900 (a sixth window to the west was also destroyed in 1940). The three remaining ridge stacks divide these dormers. The west end has a modern pair of dormers.

The classical colonnade, the most significant of Horace Field's additions of 1900, spans the full width of the Victoria Parade façade. At first-floor level this forms a continuous balcony, which features ornate ironwork balustrades to either side of a central pediment decorated with a garlanded cartouche over the main entrance. This central entrance has six steps leading to double panelled doors, set beneath a lunette fanlight with leaded glazing. The colonnade is raised slightly above street level, with cast-iron grilles between the brick piers giving light to the covered service run beneath.

The eastern return range fronting Victoria Road has a pair of window bays continuing the arrangement of the principal façade and then progresses into an equally dense, muscular Lombardi Gothic range added in 1868-69, with two extra storeys added to the central part after 1877, these largely replicating the original form. This elevation is composed of a central trio of buttress-stacks interspersed between four bays of rebated and segmentally-headed sashes, strung together by continuous plat and cill bands at each level and set beneath a Lombard frieze parapet. Flanking this central arrangement is a pair of projecting bays with tripartite sash windows, also with rebated segmental arches. At the northern end of the range is a bay that steps out from the range and continues the tripartite sash arrangement whilst introducing two pierced stone balconies to the first and second storeys and an additional fifth storey with crenellated turrets.

The grand terminal tower at the end of the range features substantial battered buttresses and brick balconies at second-floor level to the north and east elevations, both with a rendered arched area above. The design echoes Pugin's almost contemporary tower at Stanbrook Abbey, Worcestershire (listed Grade II). The tower's original form has been truncated and a battlemented stage rebuilt.

On the north elevation, adjoining the tower, are three additional bays of contemporary date. Each bay has a trio of sash windows under segmental arches; that to the east of five storeys with one remaining stone Granville lion finial to its parapet (two other examples were apparently removed from the building and are situated around 100 metres further east along Victoria Parade; both listed Grade II). The western pair of bays both have double-storey oriel windows on stepped brick brackets above large pointed-arch windows at street level. The western gable end of this north range is plain, but does bear the gable marks of the previous adjoining Turkish bath range, for which demolition was consented in 1980.

Interior

The main Victoria Parade entrance hall is reached via a fine revolving door set into a part-glazed screen. The Tuscan columned entrance hall has fielded panelling with a bead moulded cornice, a marble tile floor, and a pair of grand fireplaces with swagged overmantles. The whole scheme is executed in an Adamesque classical style, presumably the work of Field in 1900. This room opens to a grand staircase with a turned baluster open-well stair, entirely rebuilt after a fire in 1985. A series of leaded stained-glass windows feature here, including the heraldic crests of Kent, Ramsgate, Dover and Broadstairs along with shell and conch motifs.

Individual apartments were not inspected, but some original four-panelled doors and part of a staircase with chamfered leading edges and newel posts redolent of Pugin's ecclesiastical fittings of the period are retained on the upper floor of the easternmost bay of the Victoria Parade range. The interior of the tower was not inspected in 2018. The western Granville Court addition of 2004 contains a series of residential apartments which are all designed to standard specifications and do not contribute to the special interest of the wider site. These are excluded from this listing.

The ground floor of the eastern range is comprised of a series of grand rooms and halls. From the south, these are:

The Granville Bar: a broad undivided room with full-height fielded panelling, a bead moulded cornice, engaged fluted pilasters with gilt Corinthian capitals paired with matching columns to the north and south walls, and two exceptionally wide fireplaces with overmantles centrally positioned on west and east walls. Small cast-iron fireplaces are set within marble architraves and flanked by mottled yellow glazed cheek tiles. The fire surrounds are keyed and lobed with elaborate swag detailing marking out a central cartouche bearing the letter 'G', this feature being repeated above the double doors to the north. The room is served by an inserted octagonal island bar counter and bar back.

Prince Albert Room: originally a ballroom or concert room, with a central maple sprung floor. The room is decorated in a lavish Louis XVI style, giving some sense of the High-Victorian eclecticism of the 1900 design scheme commissioned by Spiers and Pond. Ornate plasterwork borders the ceiling, with deep coving beneath the cornice. A series of panels with elaborate scrolled surrounds are interspersed between windows and doors above a dado rail. Above the panelled, part-glazed double doors there is further intricate scroll and swag ornamentation. A fireplace with an overmantle on the west wall has been stripped out, leaving exposed brick.

Anteroom: a small square room set off the Prince Albert Room and Granville Bar. Each wall has keyed arches recessed within a broader arch; the corners between the arches forming spandrels which rise to a circular plaster ceiling panel, which presumably originally possessed a chandelier as a centrepiece.

Banqueting Hall: this is the largest room within the east range and the only space where Pugin's initial phase of work at the Granville can be seen clearly; his hand being most evident in the elaborate Baronial style fireplace on the west wall. This has engaged granite columns and finely carved stone capitals, foliage details, and an arched overmantle with a central heraldic crest. Exemplifying the Pugins' inclination towards including aphorisms and quotations in their work, the lintel of the fireplace carries the cheerful inscription "pile on the logs to make this fire great" in painted Gothic script. The ceiling of the hall is coffered with central plaster rosettes picked out in gold. The east wall has five full-height windows, the central one recessed. The opposing west wall has two further full-height windows to either side of the central fireplace. The north end retains a moulded proscenium arch for a stage which has since been blocked.