Westonbirt House With South Terrace

Westonbirt House is a large country house built between 1863 and 1870 by architect Lewis Vulliamy for Robert Stayner Holford. It has functioned as a school since 1928. The house is designed in the style of Elizabethan prodigy houses with Renaissance classical ornament, constructed from yellow-brown ashlar from Box with slate roofs. The roofline is decorated with scattered stone stacks of grouped and single polygonal flues, and features urns, finials and obelisks as skyline ornament.

The building comprises a rectangular main block of mostly 2 tall storeys with an attic in a series of large dormers, punctuated by 3-storey corner towers and a 5-storey central tower dated 1868 to the north. A lower east wing dated 1866 merges into a 2-storey service courtyard dated 1865. A single-storey large orangery extends to the west, dated 1872.

The exterior displays highly decorative use of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders inset with stone mullion and transom fenestration, sculpted cornices and aprons, and elaborately carved friezes to each order. The attic storey skylights employ Corinthian order and French motifs including shell pediments, set between a pierced strapwork balustrade. The central north tower features an ogee fish-scale dome and is recessed twice from the end lower towers, which have sculpted heads in roundels on the inside returns. A large round-arched columned porte-cochere occupies the centre with a small colonnade linking to the main walls on each side. The south front contains 5 bays with a central half-round oriel on the first floor. The orangery, now converted to a theatre, displays tall radial glazed round-headed arches between attached columns on its south side, three large 3-light stone mullion and transom windows to the north side, a stone balustrade with spiked ball finials, and a projecting north-west pavilion with an open arcaded upper storey and ogee fish-scale dome.

The interior is arranged around a central top-lit saloon with rooms in remarkably good condition. The decoration is of extremely high quality, with many original silk and leather wall coverings surviving alongside painted decoration in the main bedrooms along the south front. All ground floor rooms feature elaborate plaster ceilings. Original fittings survive, particularly in the library, and most fireplaces remain intact. The joinery throughout is of very high quality, principally in oak and walnut. The house represents Vulliamy's most important surviving domestic building and is distinguished by exceptionally fine craftsmanship that has remained virtually unaltered throughout its years of use as a school.

On the south side, the house sits on a terrace with a low moulded stone wall edged by 14 large gadrooned ornamental urns, with steps down at the centre and at each end. Set back from the main block to the south-east is a small bronze sundial supported by putti.