Steyning Manor

Steyning Manor, formerly known as Steyning Manor Farmhouse, is a manor house dating from the late 15th to early 16th century. It was enlarged in the early 17th century and underwent alterations in the late 17th century and early to mid-19th century. The exterior features roughcast over blue lias rubble and gabled slate roofs with coped verges and 19th-century finials. The original plan consists of an early manor house with three cells and a stair turret, fronted by a double pile block with linking wings.

The building has one and a half storeys and is arranged in three bays. The facade was originally symmetrical before the addition of a flat-roofed single-storey extension on the left side. The central entrance features a full-height gabled porch, and all windows are ovolo moulded, mullioned, and transomed, set beneath hood moulds. The first floor has five-light windows flanking a three-light window in the porch, while the ground floor has five-light windows beside a depressed four-centred arch doorway with moulded jambs and a similar inner doorway. The gabled returns were symmetrical before the early 20th-century addition of a gabled water tower on the right.

Inside, the manor boasts exuberant late 17th-century plasterwork to the right of a renewed cross passage, with plaster overmantel and 18th-century panelling to the left, along with a ribbed ceiling. There is a Jacobean dog-leg stair with turned balusters and a gate, and some plasterwork decoration on the first floor, including arched head doorways. The original manor house at the rear features very large chamfered beams, a large fireplace bay at the east end, and a spiral stair in the turret. This building is significant for its relatively unaltered survival of the earlier manor house and as an early example of a double pile Renaissance house in Somerset. The plasterwork in the hall shares similarities with that at Dunster Castle.