Beara Court including attached service wing, stable block, garage, gate piers, garden walls and steps

Beara Court is a country house built between 1873 and 1890 by Lucius H Reichel on the site of an earlier house. It includes an attached service wing, stables and garage of late 19th and 20th century date, together with late 19th century entrance gates, piers, garden walls and steps.

The house is built of granite and slatestone with granite dressings. The south front has coursed stone, while the north side is randomly dressed. There is half-timbering, clay roof tiles, brick chimney stacks, cast-iron rainwater goods, and metal and timber casements with leaded panes or timber glazing bars. Some windows to the rear are replacements.

The building is asymmetrically rectangular in plan, oriented east-west. The entrance is off-centre on the east end of the south front, with a wing projecting at the west end of the north side containing a great hall. Attached at an angle to the west end is a stables and garage with staff accommodation.

The house is designed in the Old English style. The principal south front is of two storeys with basement and gabled attic dormers, arranged in an irregular six bays with a central chimney stack. The three eastern bays break forward with a full-height gabled stone porch projecting centrally. This porch has a chamfered Gothic arch with decorated spandrels, set within a straight-headed stone architrave with rams horn detailing at the base and a tablet above bearing a coat of arms in relief. Inside is a brick-vaulted vestibule. The windows in these eastern bays have metal casements with hexagonal patterns of glazing.

At the west end stands a tall chimney stack with quadruple brick shafts, abutting a large two-storey timber bay window. This bay window features patterns of curved timber braces in the frieze between the windows and herringbone patterns in the gable. A smaller oriel window in the adjoining bay has the same patterned frieze and gable. Below this is a secondary door and two reset mullioned windows. The east bay of this front has a modern lean-to conservatory. The east elevation has a gable with cut bargeboard and a pair of two-storey bow windows with conical lead roofs, each rising from a stone, buttress-like foundation.

The garden front on the north side of the three-bay eastern part rises to three storeys plus attic. At its centre is a large mullioned stair window above a garden door with steps. The casement windows here have similar patterns of glazing to the south front, and the bay in the angle with the Great Hall wing has half-timbered patterns. The gabled wing projects forward in the western part, with a cusped bargeboard and tall mullioned casements to each elevation. On its north end is a wide two-centred arch with steps and a ramped low stone wall in front. A brick stack breaks through the middle of the roofslope to the west of this wing. The house's west elevation is wide and gabled, and is partially tile-hung.

Inside, the house features a variety of oak and elm joinery including ceiling beams, panelled doors, panelling, staircases and floorboards, some reused and some custom-made. The oak-framed entrance door has an iron knocker and is set within a chamfered granite architrave. The entrance opens into a hall arranged in the manner of a screens passage, leading to an open-well staircase at the rear. This is spanned by four substantial cranked beams with deep ovolo chamfers and cluster-moulded joists between the beams. Both the passage and staircase have oak wainscoting with a moulded dado rail. The staircase has an oak balustrade with ball finials to the newels and turned balusters. Below the stair is a panelled cellar door with a reused early timber door head.

The entrance hall has a plastered arcade of three chamfered Gothic arches on the west side, separating it from an inner hall to the south and an axial corridor leading to the Great Hall and service end. A Gothic arch also separates the inner hall from the corridor, and the corridor from a rear inner hall on its north side. The inner hall has a ceiling of cluster-moulded joists and an ovolo-chamfered cross beam supported on a stone corbel at the west end, with a similar beam set above the front window. The fireplace in the west wall has a chamfered granite chimneypiece and hearth with 20th century adaptations. The rear inner hall has a chamfered oak ceiling.

The doorcase from the entrance hall to the drawing room at the east end is well-detailed with a panelled oak door. This room has a substantial oak ceiling with stop-chamfered cross beams and joists, and a plaster frieze. The granite fireplace has an oak chimneypiece and a decoratively carved overmantel reused from 16th century furniture. The two windows at the east end have fitted bench seating under oak-framed ceilings and oak boxing. There are French doors to the conservatory on the south side and some finely detailed rebated oak shutters.

The oak-panelled Great Hall, or dining room, is open to the roof and has an inglenook in the west wall with a stone fireplace below a gallery with a Tudor-arched arcade. The roof has five trusses set on corbels, alternately hammer-beam and dentilled tie beams, with tracery to the spandrels between the posts and braces, and curved wind braces to three sets of purlins above. The central trusses are engaged with the gallery arcade. To the left of the inglenook is a bar servery concealed within the panelling.

On the south front, opposite the hall, is a sitting room with a fireplace and early timber chimneypiece with overmantel. There is a stop-chamfered cross beam to the ceiling.

In the service corridor at the west end is a bell indicator panel connected to bell pushes in rooms across the house. North of the corridor is the kitchen, and to the south is a butler's pantry or study which has a corner fireplace, a sink under the south window, and an interior timber casement window shared with the corridor through the staff accommodation and garage wing.

The first-floor landing and bedrooms are accessed from both the main staircase and a back stair. They have oak joinery and chamfered ceiling beams (in some bedrooms the beams are 20th century compositions), panelled doors, cast-iron radiators and tiled chimneypieces. Above the main staircase and landing is an ovolo-chamfered oak ceiling with counterchange pine boarding in six compartments. The bedroom at the west end has a raised ceiling and exposed tie beams from the roof above. The back stair retains substantial parts of an early staircase or staircases to attic level, and parts are possibly in situ from the earlier house on the site.

Below the Great Hall is a basement accessed by steps from a wide oak plank door with iron studs. There is a fireplace built within the vaulted ceiling. The basement under the east end of the house has rooms with stop-chamfered beams facing the garden, which may relate to the earlier house on the site. There is a labyrinthine set of rooms and passages with unfinished stone walls and vaulting under the south side of the house, with signs of former window openings. There is a late 19th century chamfered and pegged doorframe to the stone steps under the main staircase.

The garage, stables and staff wing are attached to the west end of the house. The principal garage elevation faces east and has a wide opening with ashlar voussoirs forming a Tudor arch, and glazed timber garage doors. The south elevation is of slatestone with quoins and window architraves of dressed granite. To the right, the garage has two casements with clay tile cills. To the left, the half-hipped gable end of the stable has a louvred fanlight to the right of the stable door and a loading door to the gable. The west flank has a tiered brick plinth and timber casements with louvred upper lights. The north elevation has three brick gabled ends, mainly in Flemish bond, and to the left an infill connection to the house. There are three mid to late 20th century inserted pilasters on this elevation, with the central one cutting through the casements. The openings have segmental brick heads and there are doors to left and right of centre. The right gable is half-hipped and there is a loading door to the gable.

Internally, the stables have boarded stalls with cast-iron partitioning and stone setts and gutter to the floor. There is an inserted brick tack room. The staff accommodation wing has an apartment with mid 20th century fixtures and staircase, and on the ground floor there are former storage rooms with matchboarded walls.

The grounds include low stone walls with ramping, coping stones, stone urns and steps, both down to the north lawn and to the north beyond the tennis court. Other ramped walls define a courtyard in front of the staff wing.