Clareston

Clareston is a grade II* country house dating from the early nineteenth century, built in unpainted render with slate roofs and rendered chimney stacks. The building comprises a main two-storey front block with attic, a plain double-roofed rear wing, and various later additions.

The front elevation is a five-bay range with early nineteenth-century detailing, featuring a moulded cornice and an ashlar balustraded parapet spanning four bays with a wide blank panel at the centre. The first floor contains five twentieth-century windows set well below the cornice, above which marks of earlier first-floor canopies remain visible. The ground floor features two large curved bows, each containing three long French windows with renewed small-paned glazing. Both bows are capped with plain cornices and wrought-iron railings behind small battlements, the railings possibly dating to the early nineteenth century and worked to an intersecting circle pattern. Rendered end chimneys rise on the end gables, which feature twentieth-century twelve-pane loft windows.

The plain rear wing is double-roofed with paired end gables and rendered chimneys. The right gable includes twentieth-century glazing to an arched long loft window. Set back from the right gable of the main house is a large square single-storey addition dating to around 1830, finished in stucco with a cornice matching that of the bows and an embattled parapet.

The front-left elevation features a tall, rather narrow stucco Greek Doric porch with fluted columns, pilaster responds, and a deep entablature with wreaths in the frieze, cornice, and balustrade on three sides. The arched doorway retains an early nineteenth-century six-panel door with four fielded panels having curved rebates to the corners and radiating bars to the fanlight. To the right of the porch is a twentieth-century window. The left side wall retains only one original window, a twelve-pane sash. Above, on the wing, two twentieth-century windows replace earlier sashes.

A low two-storey wing projects at the right with a battlemented end stack and two twentieth-century gable windows. On its side is a projecting roughcast half-octagonal chimneybreast with a tapering octagonal battlemented stack set in the angle to the single-storey addition. A twentieth-century window stands to the right, with battlements at the eaves. The rear of this range contains a twentieth-century bay-window with steep hipped roof and a stone gothic porch dated 1996. A crosswing extends to the right, running back to the end of the left rear gable. A twentieth-century conservatory stands on the rear right gable end.

The interior was extensively remodelled by William Owen in a complex series of small spaces designed to create a formal corridor running from the entrance porch behind the front rooms to a staircase at the opposite end. The detailing is of unusually fine quality throughout and is clearly attributable to Owen, matching work by him at Picton Castle. The entrance hall is square with an acanthus rose and two arches through the existing side wall of the house. The next space is also square, featuring a panelled ceiling with egg-and-dart moulding and a double elliptical arch into a rectangular space at the end of the corridor running right towards the kitchen. Two ceiling sections contain two roses and cornices with rosettes on the mutules. A fanlight stands above the door to the service end. An elliptical panelled arch leads ahead to the space before the stair, which has a tiny ceiling with a rose and mutule cornice with rosettes. A panelled door to the right features beaded moulding to the panels. A delicately panelled arch opens to the left into a small semicircular lobby with a similar cornice over a deep frieze with panels and embossed cherub ornament. Two quarter-circle curved six-panel doors in moulded architraves open into the corners of the two front rooms.

The staircase is cantilevered in Bath stone with wrought-iron big S-scrolls to the balustrades, rising in a narrow well to a tiny dome at the top. Curved landings feature arched windows with intersecting glazing bars and panelled reveals. The ground floor front rooms have convex-curved doors in corners with beaded borders to the panels. The left room features vine-scroll cornices and an elliptical-arched recess set off-centre on the back wall, with leaf moulding and a lion-mask on pilasters, and panelled shutters. The right-hand room is similarly treated. The first floor landing has two panelled arches and a similar semicircular recess giving access to three doors. The dome is panelled with an acanthus rose and a moulded square frame with fluted spandrels.