Aldro School

Aldro School is a house, now a school, built between 1894 and 1896. It incorporates part of an earlier 18th-century house to the left, and a porch was added in 1906. The school was designed by Henry Tanner Jnr. for Sir Edgar Horne. The left range is constructed of coursed Bargate stone with red brick above, stone dressings, and a rendered gable. The main house section is of galleted sandstone in places, with brick dressings, and has plain tiled roofs of varying heights, with a hipped roof to the ends. The building has an L-shaped plan, with a wing projecting to the front left and a cobbled courtyard forming a re-entrant angle.

The left range, dating back to the 18th century, is two storeys high with a plat band above the ground floor and a moulded wooden eaves board with a corbelled ridge stack to the left, and a large ribbed Norman Shaw-style stack to the right where it joins the main house. It has sash windows with four panes of glass to the first floor under gauged brick cambered heads. Three taller windows are on the ground floor. A small part-glazed door is located on the ground floor right within the re-entrant angle. A lower hipped roof wing angles away at the left end.

The main house features a large, jettied gable resting on a moulded bressumer supported by four brackets, two at each end and one on either side of the centre. Three louvred “breathers” are set under bracketed flat hoods at the gable apex, with three casement windows below, also under similar hoods. Two leaded shallow angle bay wood-framed casements flank a central 2-light casement on the first floor. The projecting ground floor has a central break containing three leaded mullioned and transomed windows. A Doric columned two-bay arcade sits on either side of this break, with keystones supporting an entablature, now blocked on the left. One bay returns to the right end. An end stack sits to the right, with an angle bay attached to the plinth, linking to the right-hand range which is set back. The building has a plinth with a coved eaves course and flat roof, as well as flat-roofed multi-light dormers. The first floor has three casement windows, with three windows on the ground floor below. Panelled doors are located on the left side of the ground floor, central to the facade.

The rear elevation includes three large dormers with heavy gables, jettied on braces. An angle bay is visible at the right end, along with a tall staircase window and a stone mullioned oriel to the centre. A Tudor-style wing is positioned to the left.

The interior includes visible panelling from the 18th and 20th centuries, and a staircase with barley-sugar balusters and scrolled tread ends, which originated from a house in Chiswick. A Baroque fireplace surround and a 19th-century plaster panelled ceiling are found in a ground floor room on the left. The gardens were originally laid out by Gertrude Jekyll.