Cabalva House

Cabalva House is a small country house, dating in part to the late medieval period, with substantial additions and alterations from the 19th century. It comprises three principal blocks arranged in a complex plan. The house is built with rubble walls, rendered with cement, and has slate roofs and red brick chimney stacks. It is two storeys high with an attic.

The north-west front displays several phases of development. To the extreme right is a two-storey addition of the 19th century, featuring wave-moulded bargeboards to a pair of gables. It has 12-pane sash windows, with taller ground-floor windows. A central porch features a round-arched entrance and a fine doorway with a reeded surround and fanlight. To the left of the porch is a tall stair window with 15 panes and pointed arched glazing bars, beyond which are a pair of attic dormers with similar bargeboards. A projecting gable contains a 6-pane door and a lean-to. To the north-east stands a two-storey range with origins from the late medieval period, with a stone chimney stack heightened in yellow brick. Externally, the only significant indication of these early origins is a small exposed timber fragment, believed to be part of a cruck truss. The slightly stepped forward upper storey suggests the original building may have been a jettied cruck-framed hall house. A parallel range extends behind this, with a gable facing the front. The left end of this range has been modernised but retains some 19th-century leaded lights. The long garden front is stepped up to either end and gabled, with similar wave-pattern detailing. It has near-flush small-pane sashes, including paired windows to the right and triple windows to the left, all with reeded surrounds; a splayed bay window is located on the ground floor to the left. Gable ends have similar windows, and the south-west gable has a rubble buttress.

The entrance opens into an unusual domical entrance hall with pendentives in the style of Sir John Soane, architect of the Bank of England, and a foliated band at the base. The main rooms are well-detailed in a neo-classical style, featuring marble chimney pieces and six-panel doors with fine doorcases enriched with reeding and bosses. There is a variety of classical cornices. The dining room has two fluted Corinthian columns framing a recess. A broad openwell staircase rises to the left of the hall, with S-shaped tread ends, a scrolled newel, and straight balusters. The first-floor landing has two small internal windows with patterned glazing, lighting a laundry room and another service room. The original medieval origins of the house are found internally at the rear, with broach-stopped ceiling beams on the ground floor and hollow and fillet-stopped beams on the first floor. One bedroom also contains reused dado panelling, likely from elsewhere in the house.