The Bulkeley Hotel including screen wall to lefthand courtyard

The Bulkeley Hotel is a Grade I listed neo-classical hotel comprising three storeys with attic and basement. It is built of ashlar to the main elevations with a slate roof behind coped gables and a deeply moulded stone cornice, and ashlar chimney stacks. The building comprises north and south ranges facing Castle Street and The Green respectively, with a central link creating an H-plan with courtyards.

The main entrance faces Castle Street with an austere but distinguished five-bay symmetrical front. The lower storey features channelled rustication over a plinth. The entrance portico has paired square columns with Soane-type incised key pattern, set between central steps, an entablature with triglyphs and guttae over the columns, and a balcony with balustrade. The centre of the balustrade contains a coat of arms in an oval panel with scrolled sides. Double panelled doors have an overlight of tall narrow panes, with flanking narrow windows featuring thin glazing bars. The inscription 'The Bulkeley Arms' is inscribed over the door. The lower storey has twelve-pane hornless sash windows. The middle storey has architraves with pediments and sill bands to windows incorporating two-light casements below fixed small panes, with neo-classical cast iron railings. The upper storey has shorter nine-pane sash windows with sills. The attic features two-light roof dormers.

The south range has an equally distinguished symmetrical five-bay ashlar front with a projecting canted central bay and tripartite lintels. The central entrance has an added veranda with a wave pattern to the fascia and simple iron posts. A revolving door was inserted in the 1930s, to the left of which is a margin-glazed twelve-pane window, and to the right a margin-lit small-pane French door. In the outer bays the lower storey has fifteen-pane margin-lit sash windows. The middle storey has twelve-pane windows and the upper storey shorter nine-pane sashes. On the left side is a projecting pebble-dashed three-storey three-bay extension of equal height to the main range, with a hipped roof on projecting eaves. In the lower storey is a narrower bow-ended projection housing the banqueting hall with balcony above, featuring channelled rustication in pebble dash and render, French doors to the right and large windows. The middle and upper storeys have sixteen-pane sash windows with shutters. On the right side is a gabled three-storey two-bay addition brought forward from the main elevation, probably dating from the late nineteenth century as it appears in an inter-war photograph with the original ballroom on its right side. Its lower storey has fifteen-pane margin-lit sash windows. The middle storey has fifteen-pane sashes with balconies and shutters and the upper storey shorter nine-pane sashes, also with shutters. A bullseye window is set in the gable. A one-bay flat-roofed projection projects further forward at the right end, with shuttered windows similar to the extension to its left.

The side elevations are more utilitarian. The left (west) end wall of the south range, facing Wall Street, features a twentieth-century addition which is pebble-dashed and has three sash windows of five lying panes in the lower storey, and two small-pane sash windows to the middle and upper storeys. Further left, entered from Wall Street, the rear of the north and south ranges and the central link form a courtyard with walls of scribed roughcast painted cream or pebble-dashed, mainly with small-pane sash windows, with added escape stairs and doors, and an entrance to a basement below the central link. The opposite courtyard on the east side has a flat-roof one-storey projection, but otherwise has similar roughcast walls with sash windows.

The right gable end of the north range is roughcast above the Town Hall. The left gable end is pebble-dashed and has superimposed stair windows over a one-and-a-half storey projection. Set back behind is an added two-storey two-window range set back from Castle Street behind a walled courtyard. It has pebble-dashed walls and slate roof, with twelve-pane sash windows in the upper storey.

The interior contains a main imperial stair entered from Castle Street to the right of the entrance hall. It has a wreathed hand rail with fluted newel and a cast iron balustrade with plant and anthemion motifs, rising to a first-floor landing which crosses to the stair to the second floor. This is a curving cantilever stair with wreathed hand rail and plain balusters. On the second-floor landing is a plainer attic stair. The twentieth-century extension in the south range incorporates a simple open-well stair from first to second floor. The south range has a corridor in the lower storey with a plaster cornice enriched by egg-and-dart and billet friezes.

A screen wall to the left-hand courtyard is included in this listing.