Blaise Castle House And Attached Wall

Blaise Castle House is a late 18th and early 19th century house, now a museum, situated on Henbury Road in Bristol. Built between 1795 and 1799 by William Paty for J.S. Harford, it was extended in 1831–32 by C.R. Cockerell for J. Harford Junior. The house is constructed of limestone ashlar and render, with a slate roof.

The building is of a double-depth plan arranged around a central hall and is in a Neoclassical style. The front elevation has two storeys and a five-window range, with a pedimented and slightly projecting centre. A central semicircular Ionic portico, set on a low platform, features banded, square-cut rustication to the ground floor, a plat band to the first floor, a modillion cornice, and a balustrade. Behind the portico is an exedra containing two niches and a swag frieze decorated with bucrania. The front contains a half-glazed door with a decorative fanlight, and 6/6-pane sash windows with moulded architraves. The first floor has sunken panels. The garden front was remodelled around 1832, introducing a central ground-floor arcade with French windows, mirroring the style of the Ionic tetrastyle portico to the right, added by Cockerell as an Exhibition Room. To the left of the main front is a lower, two-storey service wing, also extended by Cockerell, forming an L-shaped plan. The façade of this wing, dating to 1831–32, is rendered with a rusticated ground floor, a plat band, a moulded cornice, and a balustrade; it has 3/3-pane sash windows in moulded architraves.

The interior retains a complete Neoclassical decorative scheme by Cockerell, reflecting statuary collected by Harford Junior during his 1832 Italian tour. Notable features include a large Portland-flagged hall with square columns and medallions, an open-well stair with moulded stone steps and cast-iron balusters – incorporating panels from the Parthenon and a niche containing a cast of Michelangelo’s work – plaster panels and cornices throughout, marble and plaster fireplaces (the Dining Room featuring a cast-iron basket), fluted Corinthian columns in the Library, scagliola distyle-in-antis Corinthian columns and wainscotting in the Exhibition Room, an oval lantern with a plaster surround in the Exhibition Room, balustraded arches in the first-floor stair well, mahogany six-panel doors, and a dogleg stair in the service wing with stone treads and cast-iron balusters.

An attached rubble wall encloses the yard to the east, rising to two segmental-arched openings with Pennant dressings. The house is set within a landscape planned around 1796 by Humphry Repton, with possible influences from John Nash.