Redland Court (Redland High School)

Redland Court, now Redland High School, is a house built between 1732 and 1735 by John Strachan for John Cossins. It is constructed of limestone ashlar with rendered elevations, limestone dressings, ashlar stacks, and Pennant stone steps. The roof is not visible. The building follows an axial, double-depth plan and is designed in the Palladian style.

The house is arranged as a symmetrical composition with a central seven-window block flanked by pavilions. The main block has steps leading to a slightly projecting centre with a rusticated ground floor featuring three 19th-century French windows beneath a tented glazed verandah. Above this is a tetrastyle-in-antis Ionic portico with a modillion pediment, adorned with four putti around a cartouche, and three windows with architraves beneath a swag. Clasping pilasters, sill bands, cornices, and a balustrade with seven urns are present. Gibbs surrounds define the basement and ground-floor windows, the latter having prominent voussoirs over cornices, while the first-floor windows have architraves and cornices, all with plate-glass sashes. The flanking pavilions have rusticated pilasters to a cornice and parapet, with plain urns, and feature a Venetian window with a shell-head niche flanked by narrow windows with Gibbs surrounds and voussoirs, above a blind balustrade, with plain first-floor sashes. An octagonal cupola is present on the left pavilion, while the right pavilion has a 19th-century upper floor. Connecting ranges have two semicircular-arched ground-floor windows and small plain windows under a cornice.

The interior features three front rooms with full panelling, modillion cornices, and fluted Ionic pilasters to segmental arches framing four-fold doors connecting the central and eastern rooms. Good marble fireplaces are also present. A central stone-flagged hall at the rear has a decorative ceiling, a Doric frieze, and a doorcase with a broken pediment and a mahogany six-panel door. Open-well staircases are located either side of the hall; the left staircase follows the semicircular wall to a quarter landing with a semi-domed ceiling, barleysugar column-on-vase balusters, fluted Doric column newels, ramped rails, and pedimented doorcases, a Doric frieze with bucrania. The right-hand staircase has quarter landings and plainer column-on-vase balusters, and doorcases with segmental pediments. An Elizabethan house on the site was demolished in 1730, and some of its panelling was reused in the construction of Redland Court. The design incorporates details derived from Colen Campbell’s work at Houghton.