Cwmcarvan Court

A 2-storeyed house of elegant Georgian proportions. It has white-painted roughcast walls (probably of rubble construction) and hipped slate roofs swept out over prominently oversailing eaves. The plan is L-shaped, formed by an architectural front range on an E-W axis facing S (to the garden) with a long wing to the rear (E) of its W half, the E side of this including the present main entrance. The 3-window S front is symmetrical, with end-wall chimneys, and unusually long, the openings widely-spaced. In the centre is a round-headed doorway, protected by a segmental canopy carried on consoles (and supported at the outer corners by slender cast-iron posts), with reeded jambs, a recessed part-glazed door and a fanlight with radiating glazing bars. Above the doorway is a 16-pane hornless sash window, and about midway between these openings and each outer corner is a relatively narrow 2-storey semicircular bay with curved tripartite multi-pane hornless sash windows. The E return wall has two 12-pane sashes on each floor, the upper much smaller. The E side of the rear wing (i.e. the present entrance front) has 3 large segmental-headed windows on each floor, vertically-aligned but irregularly spaced, the middle ones being offset left. The third at ground floor (now covered by a large glass lean-to) is sashed, but all the others have unusual 3-light joinery with high-set transoms and leaded small-pane glazing: the mullions and transoms flat-faced, the glazing almost flush, and the centre light of each containing a cast-iron casement with external hinges. The present main doorway, which is placed between the 1st and 2nd windows, and appears to be an early C20 insertion, has a slimmed-down classical architrave of ashlar, with a flat canopy on shaped consoles and a reproduction studded door.

The main range has stone-flagged floors and an open-string staircase with 2 stick balusters per tread and a wreathed curtail. A large room in the rear wing, which was probably originally the kitchen, now has parquet-block flooring and wall-panelling of early C20 historicist character (like the architrave of the doorway which opens into it).