Digby House Including Dwarf Wall, Piers, Railings And Lampstandards Along Digby Road

Digby House, formerly the Digby Hotel which opened in 1869, is located on the south-west side of Digby Road. This three-storey building features a garden front with eight window bays and a tile roof that has alternating bands of plain and shaped tiles. The front is made of ashlar stone, and the windows have splayed sills. At each end of the house, there are projecting gabled wings with splayed bay windows that extend through three floors, each with an ashlar stack on the verge of the roof at the inner return. The central wing has gabled attic windows with two lights and stone mullions, similar windows on the first floor, and transomed and mullioned windows on the ground floor. There are four tall ashlar stacks.

The front facing Digby Road consists of three storeys and seven window bays, with ashlar stacks. It has a shallow projection of two bays in width, topped by a wide gable at the north end featuring a finial shaped like a Digby ostrich holding a horseshoe in its beak. The windows have splayed sills, with narrow sashes except on the ground floor. The third bay has small two-light mullioned windows on each floor and a tall single-light window on the ground floor. The fourth bay features mullioned windows with two lights on the first and attic storeys, with an attic window under a gable. The ground floor has a porch with a stepped and gabled parapet, adorned with a Digby fleur-de-lys finial, and a doorway with clustered columns in the reveals. The fifth bay has single-light windows, while the sixth and seventh bays have two-light windows, with the topmost ones also featuring gables.

Dwarf walls with railings and stone piers extend from either side of the porch to the ends of the building. The railings have uprights with spiked and fleur-de-lys finials that are very sculptural in design. Ornate cast iron lamp standards are positioned on either side of the porch, featuring square stepped and moulded bases, circular shafts that are partly fluted and partly adorned with necking bands, and circular lamp brackets with foliated decoration, holding circular glass lamps. The building is now used as a house for Sherborne School.