School at Cyfarthfa Castle

The School at Cyfarthfa Castle is a large country house designed in a picturesque castle style, situated on a terraced site. The building is basically rectangular, featuring almost symmetrical entrance and garden fronts that converge at a circular corner tower. It has coursed bull-nosed facings with ashlar dressings, crenellated parapets with false machicolation on the towers, and weathered stringcourses on the rest of the structure.

At the rear of the corner drum-tower, there is a stair and outlook turret, along with dummy arrow loops and rectangular hoodmoulds. The drum tower also has three-light mullioned windows on the top floor. The entrance front and drum feature cross windows, which may be later additions, while the ground floor of the garden front has sash windows with glazing bars. Both fronts have central towers with splayed angles and a splayed bay with a finial above the porch at the main entrance, which includes round turrets and arched openings. There is also an oriel above a Tudor garden doorway.

To the left of the main building are a castellated screen-wall and towered entrances that lead to the former stable courtyard and offices, which have now been rebuilt as school accommodation. The composition includes walls with dummy loops, a polygonal end turret, and a solid left-hand gatehouse with an arched entry beneath a three-light window, as well as a right-hand entry between round and square turrets. Tudor-style school buildings are located at the rear.

Inside, the building retains a main suite of state rooms, including an entrance hall, library, drawing room, and dining room, which are now used as a museum and art gallery. The entrance hall is baronial, featuring a ribbed ceiling, heraldic cornice, Gothic shafts, and panelling on the doorcases, along with a castellated chimney-piece in the library. The other public rooms exhibit neo-classical style with anthemion plaster bands, egg-and-dart cornices, and wide architraves with angle paterae. The drawing rooms have ceiling roses, a fine caryatid chimney-piece, and scallop-shell niches in the long drawing-room, while Ionic pilasters from a columned screen remain in the dining room.