Vale Lodge

Vale Lodge is a large suburban villa built in 1858 to a design by local architect Charles Henry Gabriel. It stands on the west side of a small common in the centre of Weston Park, a mid-to-late Victorian development at the edge of Bath city centre characterised by large villas set in spacious grounds with mature trees.

The building is constructed in Bath limestone with a triple Roman tile roof and two large external stacks to the south and north elevations. It has an L-shaped plan and displays Tudor and Gothic architectural detailing.

The east elevation is two bays wide with a main entrance bay to the right, slightly set back and forming part of a cross-wing. The entrance has steps rising to it and features a pointed arched doorway with a four-light transom and mullion window (with uPVC frames) and a three-light window above rising into a gable on the cross-wing. To the far left, the east elevation has a two-storey canted bay with tiled roof and paired one-over-one sash windows on the middle storey. The two floors above have four- and three-light windows with metal frames. To the right of the bay is a cross mullion window (uPVC frames) on the ground floor, with a single casement window (plastic replacement frames from the late 1980s) to its right and a triple casement window (metal framed) above. The roof has two gabled dormers.

The garden elevation to the south is three bays wide. To the left is a three-storey projecting bay capped with a six-faced turret roof, starting as a straight bay on the ground floor with a four-light mullion and transom window with central king mullion (uPVC frames), becoming canted on the floors above. To its right, rising above a late twentieth-century terrace on top of a former garage (now part of the basement flat and probably replacing a former conservatory, as suggested by the Ordnance Survey map of 1888), is a tall external stack rising to four cylindrical flues with a small trefoil below its base. Either side of the stack are single- and two-light windows, with a late twentieth-century dormer in the roof to its left.

The entrance hall on the north elevation has a cat slide roof with a narrow transom and mullion window and a four-light transom and mullion to its right. Above the entrance hall extends a tall external stack with, at second-floor level to its right, a four-light bay window clad in timber and a tall timber-framed dormer with a three-light window above. The far north gable end of the cross-wing has a two-light transom and mullion on second-floor level.

The interior of flat number one retains a series of original nineteenth-century features, including a decorative diagonally planked door, a narrow window with fleur-de-lys detail, and a polychromatic and geometrically patterned tiled floor in the entrance hall. Tall pointed arches mark the corridor, entrance hall and former stairwell. Original door frames and skirting boards survive throughout, and in the first-floor bedroom to the east there is decorative wood-panelled framing to the bay window and plaster cornices.

Decorative stone gate piers mark the former main entrance along Weston Park West.

Charles Henry Gabriel built Vale Lodge for himself and lived there until around 1900. By the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map of 1888, the villa stood in the west part of a triangular-shaped garden with a circular walk. From the entrance along the road a drive led to the east front of the house and to small outbuildings (possibly a coach house) approximately one hundred metres north of the villa. These outbuildings were demolished in the late twentieth century and replaced with a private dwelling called The Coach House, set in its own garden. In the late 1980s Vale Lodge was subdivided into five flats, with the garden subdivided accordingly.