Fairwater Conservative Club (Ely Rise)

Fairwater Conservative Club

A large, rambling Gothic style building constructed of polychromatic sandstone rubble with Bath stone dressings. The building rises to two storeys and an attic beneath a multi-gabled and chimneyed roof. It is notable for its fine architectural detailing and prominent use of Radyr stone dressings throughout.

The south-west entrance front begins with a gable end to a garden wing at the right-hand end, featuring a shallow external chimney breast rising in steps to a two-flued gable stack. A single storey club extension of 1973 is attached to this bay. The second bay comprises a gable end containing the main entrance to the house, with a gabled porch featuring a two-centred entrance arch supported on Radyr stone columns with cream ashlar caps. Above the porch is a four light oriel window with corbelling and a peaked canopy bearing the initials of the client W G David. This wing projects forward from a higher and wider wing with an ashlar stack on its gable end and a two-centred staircase window on the first floor of the gable, with a transomed and mullioned window below. To the left is a bay, blind below with a two-light window above, followed further left by another two-light window with a small window above.

The north-east elevation features three further gabled wings projecting from the main body. Each has two smaller windows; the left-hand gable contains a stack, the right-hand one a three-flued corbelled stack, with additional stacks rising on the main ridge behind.

The garden front faces south-east and comprises four bays. At either end are projecting wings with splayed two-storey bays; the north bay's upper floor is now rendered. From west to east, the first bay has a roof with a semi-octagonal hip rising to a peak, decorated with a foliated course and projecting gargoyles at eaves level. The first floor window of two lights is set around the angles of the splayed bay with columned shafts of pink Radyr stone between the lights. Three tall trefoil headed windows on the ground floor are set within the facets of the splayed bay. The second and third bays feature a steeply sloping verandah across the ground floor, with flat headed mullioned windows on the ground floor and two-light windows with columns of Radyr stone on the first floor, double paired on the left and paired on the right, together with two gabled roof dormers. The fourth bay at the end retains original polychromatic stonework only on the ground floor, with a rectangular headed doorway and a two-light window with a coloured shaft. The upper storey now has a flat roof and is rendered; this is said to result from an alteration during the Second World War when the building was used as an ARP look-out. The steeply pitched roof displays groups of diamond-set pale ashlar stacks on the gable ends and also central to the ridge.

Large extensions flank the garden front: a single storey Ball and Function Room was added to the left in 1973, and a single storey Snooker Room, closely contemporary, to the right.

The entrance hall contains a Gothic Burges-type alabaster fireplace with paired colonnettes. The hall doors feature linenfold panelling and architraves decorated with leaf motifs and intricate finger plates. A timber Gothic staircase with a panelled soffit and coloured glass roof light rises from the hall. The main Drawing Room has been formed by amalgamating three original rooms along the garden front; these were possibly interconnected from the outset, or certainly two of them were. Two elaborate fireplaces and panelled ceilings with moulded ribs survive in this space. The upper rooms have all been altered.