Plas Taliaris

Plas Taliaris is a Grade I listed building representing an early 18th-century refronting of a house dating to around 1660, though the roof structure suggests possible earlier work beneath.

The Main Building

The house rises to basement and three storeys with a basement and five-window south front of Bath stone ashlar, executed around 1725, and an unpainted stucco five-window east front. Hipped roofs sit behind parapets with rendered stacks. The plan is L-shaped with infill in the north-west angle.

The South Front

The principal south elevation displays a two-one-two bay arrangement with projecting centre. A raised rubble plinth supports a rusticated ground floor, above which smooth upper floors rise with rusticated quoins to the centre and channelled piers at the outer angles. A modillion cornice, coped parapet and four gadrooned urns complete the composition. The basement contains four blocked windows. The ground floor has nineteenth-century plate glass windows, narrower than those above but with straight joints suggesting later reduction in width. A flight of steps ascends to a two-column Roman Doric ashlar porch with pilaster responds, a half-glazed door and overlight, likely dating to the early nineteenth century.

The first floor contains five long sashes with twelve panes and alternating pediments, all with moulded architraves and keystones. The centre window and its architrave are oddly set back to the plane of the others within a fine aedicule featuring fluted Ionic pilasters, an apron panel and pediment. The upper floor has short twelve-pane sashes in similar architraves with keystones but no pediments, with the centre window similarly recessed. All sash-boxes are concealed.

The East Front

The east front is simpler in treatment, with channelled angle piers and a matching cornice broken forward over the angles. The parapet bears urns on rusticated corner piers and fielded intermediate piers (three urns have been removed for repair), with two bands defining the composition. The upper portion is ashlar, but the rest is unpainted stucco with windows framed in stucco architraves matching the main front but without pediments. Exposed box sashes light the rooms: plate glass on the ground floor, eighteen-pane on the first floor, and twelve-pane on the upper floor. A centre sash-door with six-pane upper sash sits in a large Roman Doric painted porch with two swollen columns and pilaster responds, executed in the early nineteenth century.

Projecting Elements

A set-back wing to the right has a basement door and twelve-pane sashes to ground and first floors, with ashlar architraves, cornice and parapet. A large north end half-external stack with offset slating marks the junction with a hipped roof running back to a half-hipped main roof. First and second floor twelve-pane sashes light the west return. To the right is a one-window three-storey section containing a door, sixteen-pane sash and six-pane sash lighting the stair. Beyond this is a projection with brick-headed twelve-pane sashes to ground and first floors.

The roof slope above this section displays Myddfai stone slates. A truncated north-west wing, possibly dating to the nineteenth century, has a one-window rubble stone west face, then a rubble stone one-window range with stone slate roof and one Venetian window to each floor, both with brick heads and cement surrounds. A set-back rendered two-storey link of low height connects to the rear of the south front, containing three windows with twelve-pane horned sashes and a door to the left remodelled in the twentieth century. The west end wall of the main house is rendered with one blocked first floor window.

Interior Features

The interiors reveal a complex building history. The entrance hall contains early eighteenth-century panelling and a Bath stone fireplace. The south-west room features an outstanding plaster ceiling of eight deep-set panels with heavily plastered and decorated beams, which appears to be of later seventeenth-century date. Panelling is cut to fit around the ceiling, though the possibility exists of two distinct phases. The decorative motifs incorporate Gwynne and Jones ravens, bulls' heads and lions, but also Rudd bells, suggesting references to a 1722–23 Gwynne–Rudd marriage. The style of the motifs is crude, while the main beam leaf-work and some scroll-work display more sophisticated technique. Similarities are evident to plasterwork at Newton House, Edwinsford and Coalbrook dating to the 1670s. Painted classical scenes after Claude ornament the areas over the door and fireplace. A coloured marble fireplace is present, together with an arched niche with original deep blue paint on the south wall.

The south-east room has been enlarged from two rooms, with early nineteenth-century detail including shutters and doors. These shutters overlay earlier eighteenth-century fielded panelling. Similar evidence appears in the north-east room. A spine corridor extends to a very fine staircase dating to around 1660, still Jacobean in style, with heavy carved newels bearing finials and pendants, thick moulded rail and turned balusters. The staircase rises in four flights to the attic.

The first floor south-west room maintains panelling similar to that below, with panelled doors. One reset later seventeenth-century panelled door is present. The west range attic contains very complex roof details, including massive tie-beams some supported only on the stud wall of the stair hall, with later king-post-and-angle-strut trusses. The south range has smaller tie-beams with extensive internal lining in red brick, presumably of early eighteenth-century date, and contains one early eighteenth-century fireplace matching that in the entrance hall. One east room is plastered with cornice and two panelled doors, while another preserves much eroded painted Italian scenes, probably of the later nineteenth century.