Melville House, Old Town, Ayton

Melville House, located in Old Town, Ayton, is an early 19th-century house with later additions and alterations. It is a symmetrical, two-storey, three-bay rectangular-plan structure, featuring a single-storey ancillary building attached at the front. The exterior is constructed from harl-pointed sandstone rubble with droved rubble dressings, including droved quoins and droved long and short surrounds to the openings, all with painted margins and projecting painted cills.

On the southeast elevation, the entrance features a centrally located timber panelled door with an opaque fanlight and a plain surround. There are single windows in the ground floor flanking bays and in all bays on the first floor. The ancillary structure is attached to the outer right at ground level.

The southwest side elevation has a single window positioned off-center to the left. The northwest rear elevation includes a single window in the outer left bay and a smaller window off-set to the right, with single windows in all three bays on the first floor.

The windows are timber sash and case with four-pane glazing. The house has modern roofing materials, stone-coped skews, and brick-built apex stacks on the southwest and northeast sides, along with various circular chimney cans.

The interior was not seen in 1998. The ancillary structure is built of red brick and has a three-bay southwest entrance elevation featuring a boarded timber door at the center and single windows in the flanking bays, all with four-pane timber windows. It has a grey slate piended roof, and its interior was also not seen in 1998.

The property is enclosed by a boundary wall made of coped and stepped tooled sandstone, with spearheaded iron railings above in parts. To the right of the entrance, there is a square-plan, coursed red sandstone gatepier topped with a corniced pyramidal cap, and two-leaf spearheaded iron gates.