Erskine Lodge

Erskine Lodge is an Edwardian motor garage with associated accommodation, built in domestic style using roughcast over brick with brick and stone dressings and clay tiled pitched roofs. The building is single-storeyed on its front elevation, though the ground slopes away to the rear where basement rooms exist.

The composition is symmetrical and articulated as a series of blocks: a central main garage block with an advanced entrance feature, flanked by domestic units. Each element has a hipped roof, making the roofs architecturally dominant features of the design.

The front elevation faces Pwllycrochan house across a field, uphill. The original vehicle entrance occupies the centre, set within a central hipped gable advanced from the garage block. The entrance has double doors set in a shallow brick arch with stone springers and keystone, topped by a shallow curved pediment projecting above the eaves. Three-light casement windows flank the doorway on both sides. The main garage roof pitch has two five-pane lights to the front and a large rear roof-light comprising twenty vertical panes.

Domestic wings project either side of the garage entrance, each with a canted bay window and single-light casement to the front. The side elevations have single and two-light casement windows with projecting porch blocks containing doorways. On the left side, an exterior staircase descends from the porch to rear basement rooms. The right side retains one UPVC window, a postwar insertion, tucked behind the projecting domestic wing.

The main garage block, less prominently finished than the front-facing sections, has a blind lower level beneath a row of eight wide horizontal small-pane windows. The ground rises at a slope to the rear right corner. A single window serves a basement store to the rear left, with one basement door in the rear projection of the left domestic wing and another on the far left of the rear wall. A postwar steel extractor fan unit has been built against a rear window, associated with the building's use as a carpentry workshop.

Originally, the two domestic wings likely contained only a couple of rooms each, appropriate for unmarried chauffeurs and mechanics who would have eaten in the hotel kitchens. The building was dominated by a wide, tall garage space lit by the large roof-lights. The interior has since been heavily altered with a mezzanine level inserted, workshops below it consuming much of the original floor space, and the right-side accommodation expanded into a single-storey flat with modernised interior extending beneath the mezzanine.

The exposed roof structure features an unusual double frame with steel beams running in parallel but separated just below the main timbers. A large pulley wheel suspended from the roof apex was used for hoisting engines and other parts. The secondary steel frame appears to have been retrofitted shortly after construction, suggesting initial concerns about the timber frame's capacity to support both its own weight and these heavy additional loads simultaneously.

Just in front of the paired sliding doors of the entrance stands a circular vehicle turntable of timber and steel. A maker's plaque at its centre reads: "H & C DAVIS & Co. Ltd. ENGINEERS & FOUNDERS. CLAPHAM. LONDON." The turntable is reportedly still in working order, allowing a parked car to be rotated by hand, though it was not fully accessible during inspection.