Van House

Van House

A large Tudor mansion comprising a two-storey main house with attic facing a courtyard to the west, a three-storey porch at the left end, and a lower two-storey east wing facing the road on the south side. Behind the main house is a former stair block at the centre. The building is constructed of rubble stone, cement rendered and painted white, with restored synthetic slate roofs.

The main house presents a four-bay front with four-light mullioned and transomed windows, restored to the lower storey and repaired to the upper storey, with string courses at plinth and floor levels. Reconstructed gablets contain simpler three-light attic windows. The three-storey porch has gablets to its main elevations and a string course in the lower storey, interrupted by the main doorway on the west side. This doorway features a moulded surround and four-centred arch with modern double boarded doors. Above it, each storey contains early sixteenth-century three-light mullioned windows with Tudor-headed lights, sunk spandrels, and hood moulds with label stops. The south return wall of the porch has plainer two-light windows in the upper storeys.

Projecting forward on the north side of the porch is a ruined wing, now single storey, built of dressed stone with two blocked Tudor-headed arches in its south wall and springers of a similar arch in the west wall, topped by a string course. The courtyard wall is attached to this projection. The north wall of the porch has an external stack corbelled to first-floor level and ruins of a turning stone stair, formerly housed in a projection. The south gable end of the main range is one bay with a reconstructed window to the lower storey, a repaired window to the upper storey, and a reconstructed attic window in a gablet, all similar to the front elevation.

The east wing, occupied as a farmhouse from the seventeenth century, has a three-window front with a cart shed to its right. At the left end is a square sixteenth-century ridge stack, with a later ridge stack to the right end of the house. The windows to the left are sixteenth-century four-light mullioned windows with Tudor-headed lights, sunk spandrels, and hood moulds. The two-light window above the doorway is plainer but has a similar hood mould. The shallow gabled porch is nineteenth-century and the doorway inside replaced an original window. To its right, in the unit added in the early seventeenth century, are three-light windows with hood moulds. The cart shed has openings with re-used stone dressings. A wide segmental-headed doorway has nineteenth-century boarded double doors, and beneath the eaves to the right is a two-light mullioned loft window. In the east (uphill) gable end is a segmental-headed loft doorway with stopped chamfer and renewed threshold.

At the rear the main range has a gabled projection which housed the original stair, with an outshut on its north side and two stepped two-light mullioned former stair lights. The east wing has a shallow projection of a former stack for a lateral fireplace, into which a doorway with a late twentieth-century door is inserted. A further doorway is inserted into the rear of the cart shed. Beneath the eaves are narrow windows.

The building was not inspected in September 1998, but according to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, it is said to retain several four-centred doorways and a fireplace in the first floor of the main range with a shallow Tudor arch.