Stables, Stoneyhill House, Galashiels Road, Walkerburn

Stables, Stoneyhill House, Galashiels Road, Walkerburn

Stoneyhill House is a 2-storey, asymmetrically planned villa designed by F T Pilkington in 1868, with an additional music room to the north-west added by James Dunn in 1890. The building exemplifies Pilkington's distinctive early French Gothic domestic style.

The house is constructed of regularly coursed masonry with ashlar dressings and features a deep eaves cornice throughout. The west elevation serves as the entrance front and displays Pilkington's most exuberant decorative vocabulary. A grand, single-storey open entrance porch of unusual plastic sculptural treatment (not to the original design) features slim colonnettes and wide stilted segmental arches. The porch parapet displays spiky moustachioed heads over a cavetto floral cornice, with rosettes in the spandrels and a hybrid mixture of Moorish and early Gothic and Romanesque detailing at the arches, including waterleaf capitals. The elaborate ashlar door surround contains a timber door with a bipartite window to its right. To the left on the ground floor are recessed bays containing a tripartite window and a single window; the first floor has gabletted dormers with console detail flanking a central tower with arched bipartite windows and a steep splayed pavilion roof, with original bracketed eaves surviving. A gabled end to the right contains an arched bipartite window to the ground floor with an inset carved panel between the lintels, a single arch-headed window to the first floor, and a blind arch at attic level. The 1890 ballroom addition adjoins the main house to the left, featuring a pend at ground floor level and a 4-light canted oriel above, with pointed stilted arch window openings with depressed-arch lights beneath blind sculptured tympana and colonette mullions with hybrid floriated capitals.

The south elevation is dominated by a large telescopic bowed bay at the south-east angle; the ground floor section of this bay has a stone roof creating the illusion of rolled lead, with a lesser arching bay to the first floor and bracketed floriate eaves rising into a semi-conical roof. A triple gable recesses the centre section, featuring gothic windows of the same type as the entrance elevation. An advanced gabled bay to the right employs a telescopic canted treatment, with stilted square heads on early French pilasters and sculptured foliate cornices. A 3-storey parapeted square tower is set back to the east, with a single-storey range extending eastwards and terminating in a pyramid-capped square tower at the south-east angle, distinguished by a distinctive diamond pattern in the masonry at the upper courses.

The east and north elevations are plainer. The north elevation faces a cobbled court to the rear, where a simple rectangular stable block retains interesting cast-iron stalls.

The windows are predominantly glazed with plate glass in timber sash and case frames; stained glass lights on the tower stairs depict Morn, Noon and Even, and coloured lights illuminate the top-lit ballroom. The roofs are piended and slated on bracketed eaves cornices, with elaborately detailed flashings rising into finely detailed axial finials; some sections feature semi-conical slated roofs with iron finials and splayed eaves detailing. Well-concealed cast-iron rainwater goods include distinctive barley-sugar rainwater pipes with grotesque spouts. The octagonal shafted chimneys vary in design and employ a bold mixture of decorative motifs; some stacks feature spiky beast-like crockets with architectural plant life sprouting from cans.

The interior contains original frescoes in the entrance hall by a Spanish artist, now painted over (dating from when the house was used as a convent). Elaborate classically derived heavy moulded plaster cornices and gilt centre roses decorate the ceilings, complemented by a dark oak stair balustrade with hybrid lion and dragon newels, a feature distinctive to Ballantyne houses in Walkerburn. Original timber work doors and surrounds survive, some with chamfered upper angles, and painted tiles feature in the bathrooms. The music room addition features a deep covered panelled ceiling, top-lit with coloured leaded glass and a central decorated cast-iron vent, oak-panelled dado with acanthus and moulded balusters supporting round cills, a carved frieze with classical roundels at dado level, and a polished oak dance floor.

A lean-to glass conservatory with a masonry end wall completes the structure.