Commonwealth House

Commonwealth House is an attached pair of houses, now used as offices, built around 1850. The structure is made of limestone ashlar and features lateral stacks, with the roof not visible. It has a double-depth plan and is designed in a Neoclassical style. Each house stands three storeys high with a basement and has a two-window range.

The front facade is symmetrical, with shallow wings and side doorways. It has a banded ground floor that leads to a moulded plat band, paired upper pilasters with capitals supporting a frieze, a dentil cornice, and a parapet. The wings feature plain ground-floor windows, and the first floor has bracketed pediments and sill blocks. The middle windows on the ground floor are paired with projecting jambs on moulded blocks, which are echoed by similar jambs on the party wall, all resting on consoles beneath a balcony adorned with bowed cast-iron railings between the wings.

The first-floor windows are tripartite with 8/8-pane margin pane sashes, while the second-floor windows are plain with 6/6-pane sashes. The ends of the houses have porches with distyle-in-antis acanthus columns supporting an entablature, and a semicircular-arched recess above that contains a stair light. The doorways are flanked by side windows and feature 6-panel doors.

Inside, the entrance stair halls have stone dogleg winder stairs with cast-iron balusters and a wreathed rail, along with bracketed cornices and 6-panel doors.