Gwernyfed High School

Gwernyfed High School

A substantial Victorian mansion in red and grey sandstones with paler limestone dressings and red tiled roofs, dating to 1877 (marked on iron downpipes).

The main north-west front overlooks an enclosed courtyard and is partly obscured on its right end by a twentieth-century school entrance building. A central three-storey gabled porch projects slightly forward, with the entrance set beneath a slated roof bracketed off impost columns and raised on five steps with brick risers. The outer entrance arch is moulded with high stops, and an inner moulded arch decorated with fleurons frames a massive oak door with moulded ribs and ironwork. Carved coats of arms flank the door—a demi-lion rampant and a cock—with the legends TAURUS GAVD ET IN SILVIS and DEUS HAEC OTIA FECIT. Above, the first floor has a three-light moulded and transomed window, and the attic gable contains a three-light window. To the left of the porch, two wide gabled bays feature similar mullioned and transomed windows: the first has a seven-light double window to the ground floor, the second a four-light, with fenestration diminishing on upper floors. Both gables are coped with ball terminals. The outer bay adjoins the stable block. The section to the right of the porch is set further back, rising only two storeys, with mullioned and transomed windows and two canted hipped timber dormers in the attic, their terminals carved as sunflowers. An expressed stack with ribbed brick flue rises prominently, and pierced ridge tiles crown the roofline.

The east elevation, behind the stables, opens onto a small courtyard with multiple intersecting roofs, including timber-framed gables with pargetting between studs and a ribbed brick stack.

The rear elevation steps down in three stages from the south-west end. Stone mullioned and transomed windows punctuate the façade, and a major external stone stack with inset ribbed flue serves the former drawing room at the south-west end. A single-storey link features a large gabled window and a lead-covered roof ventilator.

The garden front to the south-west, overlooking what may be a fountain garden possibly laid out by W.A. Nesfield (the architect's father), presents a symmetrical composition. A central canted three-storey flat-roofed bay is flanked by two bays with attic dormers that separate the outer two-storey end bays, which rise as gables behind a flat roof and lead parapet. The parapet is decorated with sunflowers, "TW" monograms, and pies. All windows are mullioned and transomed throughout. A garden door from the drawing room opens from the right of the centre bay. Iron downpipes throughout are marked with the date 1877.

Interior

The porch opens into the end of a low hall finished with dado panelling. A blocked fireplace displays a Gothic arcade on the timber lintel with a Tudor arch. The ceiling comprises twelve moulded plaster panels divided by cross beams. The staff room at the north-west end is decorated with a dentilled plaster cornice and a floral plaster ceiling, and contains an elaborate fireplace with an eared surround. The room central to the garden front features a modillioned cornice and a Carrara marble fireplace topped with a framed looking-glass.

Doors at the further end of the hall lead to the drawing room, now the school library, which contains an inglenook holding a moulded fossil-limestone fireplace with gothic demi-columns and sunflower panels on either side. A door to the left opens into the stair hall, dominated by a large black marble fireplace with bolection moulding. An open well stair rises with turned balusters and Jacobean-style carved square newels bearing family crests as terminals. A triple timber arcade crowns the stair head. The walls are panelled throughout, and impressive four-light double transomed windows have quarries decorated with silver-stained devices. The stairwell is covered by a coved ceiling enriched with floral patterns in gold. A passage to the garden door contains a fireplace with an iron moulded insert dated 1879 and a floral patterned ceiling.