Detached Accommodation Block at Plas Menai

The accommodation block comprises 9 houses with associated stores grouped around courtyards to provide shelter on the exposed site, the form and scale intended to echo the layout of a traditional farmstead. The design language is similar to that of the main centre, in its use of varied forms and mix of materials. The composition comprises a main enclosed courtyard to the NE, the SW range continuing to partially enclose a sheltered open space to the south. In the main courtyard the former principal’s house is at the NE corner, and former staff houses form the SE and SW ranges. The courtyard is enclosed on the NW side by a range of stores. Further stores/garage wrap around the SW corner of the complex.

Walls are roughcast, with some slate cladding to upper floors, particularly on the open S-facing elevations. Welsh slate roofs, often strongly overhanging and contributing to the overall picturesque composition in their varied forms, which are hipped or lean-to in places. Dark joinery detail as for the main centre. Natural stone retaining walls and boundary walls, including subsidiary enclosed spaces within the main courtyard.

The overall composition is characterised by varied massing and staggered lines, including an alternation of two-storeyed residential blocks and single-storeyed ancillary buildings in the main SE range. The former principal’s house is itself a complex composition, with external stair between lower gable and a stone retaining wall sheltered by the overhanging roof on the NW side, and with distinctive angled stone chimney clasped between the roof slopes of two blocks. Other domestic ranges simpler in form, but the whole is unified by coherent use of materials, forms, and detail, including dark timber windows (some replaced) with externally expressed mullions.

Where original layouts do survive, they are very simple. C21 alterations associated with refurbishment and changes of use (to houses 1, 2, 3 and 7) are not of special interest.