Clifton Hill House And Attached Front Walls

Clifton Hill House and attached front walls

House built 1746–1750, dated 1747. Designed by Isaac Ware and built by Thomas Paty for Paul Fisher. The building is constructed of limestone ashlar with lateral and ridge stacks and a slate hipped roof. It follows a double-depth plan and displays Palladian style architecture across three storeys and a basement, extending across an 11-window range.

The garden front is particularly fine, featuring a central five-window block with three-window basement wings to which ground floors were added in the mid-19th century. The basement is vermiculated to a band, the ground floor rusticated to a plat band, with a first-floor sill band, cornice and parapet. The central three-window section is pedimented and breaks forward. A large double stair projects from the centre of the basement to the ground floor, equipped with a balustrade and ramped rail and urns on the half-landings. The wings also have balustrades with urns.

Basement windows are set in semicircular arches with tall keys and impost bands, containing 6/6-pane sashes with thick bars. A semicircular-arched central doorway sits below the stair. The ground-floor doorway features a heavy Gibbs surround with split key, thin consoles to a cornice, and a half-glazed door. Ground-floor windows have deep keys. Sashes are 6/6-pane on the ground floor, 3/3 pane on the second floor, with blind boxes to the first floor and left side of the ground floor. The 19th-century wings have tall 2/2-pane sashes. The tympanum contains a carved armorial shield of the original owner with festoons on either side. A cast-iron balcony extends from the right-hand wing, supported on thin stanchions with pierced brackets and flat balusters.

The road elevation is identical to the garden front except for the basement. It has a four-window right-hand ground-floor wing set forward with a balustrade, and a left-hand 19th-century service block. A mid-19th-century porch extends from the doorway, matching the Gibbs surround and console cornice. The tympanum displays the patron's monogram and the date 1747.

The interior contains fine rococo plaster ceilings. A central through passage has a vaulted ceiling, while the large stair hall features a stone open-well stair with wrought-iron foliate balusters and a finely decorated ceiling. The former dining room retains a fine rococo ceiling, and other principal rooms have good 19th-century plaster ceilings. Marble fireplaces of quality are present throughout. The study has a three-bay vaulted ceiling with Gothick ogee labels featuring crockets and pinnacles to openings, and a six-panel door with fielded panels. The dogleg service stair to the basement has column balusters, with fielded panelling to the pantry and basement rooms. The basement includes a stone niche with a tap from the well, a kitchen fireplace surround, and a bread oven.

Attached ashlar walls stand either side of the road doorway, featuring rusticated piers and scrolled brackets flanking the doorway.

The house is now part of a university hall of residence, linked by a mid-19th-century block to Callander House. It forms part of an important group of early and mid-18th-century villas at Clifton. The plasterwork is probably by Thomas Paty, who was also responsible for the plasterwork at Redland Court.

Clifton Hill House was the home of writer John Addington Symonds and his wife Janet Catherine North from 1871 to 1877. It had previously been his father's house and his boyhood home. Symonds's writing was inspired by his sexuality and his affairs with other men. He influenced understandings of homosexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly through the posthumous publication of Sexual Inversion (1897), which he co-authored with Havelock Ellis.