St Monica's Home of Rest

St Monica's Home of Rest is a complex of almshouses built between 1920 and 1925, designed by Sir George Oatley for Henry Herbert Wills and Monica Wills. The building is constructed of squared, coursed Pennant rubble with limestone dressings, incorporating half-timbered gables and dormers. It features diagonally-set ashlar stacks and a tiled gabled and hipped roof with overhanging eaves. The architectural style is Cotswold Elizabethan Revival.

The building consists of two linked triangular ranges arranged around courtyards, with a projecting northeast wing and a northwest entrance block. The symmetrical principal elevation, facing southwest, has a central section with full-height canted outer bays and a square central bay with crenellated parapets. This is separated by three-window sections featuring fluted Ionic pilasters, first-floor semicircular-arched windows with balconies, and a balustrade adorned with heraldic animals. A cornice carved with beasts’ heads runs along the top. The flanking wings each have two projecting gables, with further pairs to their front ends featuring two-storey canted bays. The attics are close-studded with carved bargeboards, and are jettied with arched brackets to the ends. The wing ends terminate in crenellated canted bays matching the central section. The windows are chamfered, with one, two, and three-light mullion and transom designs, featuring metal leaded casements.

The main entrance is flanked by full-height canted bays, surmounted by a tall crenellated parapet displaying a heraldic panel. A projecting open porch features three semicircular arches supported by attached Doric columns, with an openwork parapet incorporating the patron’s initials and revolving doors.

The interior includes an axial passage along the rear elevation with a semicircular-arched tunnel vault, rear open-well stairs housed within hipped-roofed towers, plain Tudor-arched stone fireplaces, and a projecting rear theatre. The theatre has a segmental-arched roof, a deep side cornice on moulded brackets, wainscotting, and enriched decorative plasterwork.

The almshouses are named after Monica Wills, wife of Henry Herbert Wills, and were built concurrently with Wills Hall as part of the city’s almshouse foundations. Designs prepared between 1914 and 1918 for a different site were adapted when the current location became available in 1918. The building has considerable landscape value at the northern end of the Downs, with extensive gardens enclosed by a ha-ha. While visually impressive with detailed features, the design incorporates repeated forms in a somewhat mechanical manner, and the interior is relatively plain excluding the chapel and theatre. It represents a Late 19th-century Domestic and Perpendicular Revival style, emphasizing accurate historical details over abstracted forms, common in the 20th-century Gothic Revival and demonstrating exceptionally detailed work. St Monica's Chapel and St Monica's Court are described separately.