Dolfriog

Dolfriog is a Tudor-Gothic style gentry house comprising a main range with a short staircase wing alongside a larger L-plan wing to the rear. The building is two storeys with attics and a service basement, allowing the ground floor to be devoted to living rooms with varied views across the valley.

The house is constructed of coursed and dressed slate-stone with scalloped slate roofs. Axial chimney stacks flank the central bay of the main elevation and appear on the gable end of the rear wing, though the latter stack is truncated. The eaves are pronounced in their overhang. The main range features a plinth and stressed angle pilasters that continue upward to give pedimented emphasis to the gables. The house was rendered until relatively recently; this render may have been associated with presumed later 19th-century alterations. Its removal has revealed blocked windows in the main elevation and exposed rough brick construction behind the stone dressings. The rear wing incorporates markedly different masonry style with larger blocks of stone. Jackson's building reportedly had Bath stone window frames, which may have been cut back during later 19th-century changes.

The entrance front presents a long, relatively low 3-bay range with an advanced central gable over the entrance. This features a wide 4-centred arched doorway in a cavetto-moulded architrave with intersecting traceried overlight and flanking side lights with lattice glazing. An oriel window sits above the doorway with three segmentally arched mullioned lights and a chevron-moulded apron. A 2-light mullioned window occupies the gable apex above. The flanking bays display blocked windows to the ground floor with possible scars of hood-moulds, and 2-light round-arched mullions with hood-moulds on the first floor. A string course below the first floor continues across the return elevation to the west, which has tiered windows of three, two, and one lights, with traces of hood-moulds to ground and first floor windows.

The parallel gable of the L-plan rear range has windows in its south-facing elevation: paired mullioned and transomed lights with marginal glazing on each floor. An advanced gable beyond this has a 5-light ground floor window with a high-set transom and an oriel window above, similar to that of the entrance front, with a small light in the gable apex. The east-facing elevation has an oriel bay with round-headed mullioned lights to the ground floor, set over French doors and windows of the basement, in the return gable of the entrance range. Above are a 2-light window with hood-mould and a similar window to the attic storey. This attic window has a blind round-arched head suggesting an earlier window of different type, a detail also found at Cae Dafydd. A stepped stair window sits beneath the eaves in the short rear wing.

The plan comprises principal rooms to either side of a wide central hall, with the staircase offset to the rear—a layout similar to that at Cae Dafydd—and additional principal rooms in the L-plan rear wing. The hall is dominated by a large, richly decorated timber chimney piece incorporating carved narrative panels, assembled possibly from church furnishings of continental origin, which form an overmantel. Built-in seats flank the fireplace. Dado panelling with gothic arched detail echoes in the carpentry of the doorways. A fine cantilevered staircase features trefoiled decoration to the balusters and quatrefoil enrichment to the newels. Joinery of high order survives throughout the house, and there is one exposed fireplace in gothic style.