1 St. James's Mews

This is a stone-built house with a scribed rendered finish and a Welsh slate roof, dating from the late 18th century. It has a street elevation consisting of a single-window, two-storey and attic, gable-ended bay projecting to the left, and a symmetrical, one-plus-one-plus-three-plus-one window, two-storey range to the right, with hipped roofs over the advanced wings. The windows are small-pane sashes, much of which have been restored. The main first-floor windows are tripartite, with a 12-pane sash centrally positioned over what was likely the original main entrance. The gabled bay has a 6 over 6-pane sash to the attic, and paired 12-pane sashes below; the ground floor of this bay is a restoration from previous garage doors.

In 1926, the ground floor of the entire building was altered to be used as a garage, involving the addition of a showroom to the street and the insertion of high, service bay doors at either end. This has since been restored to a domestic appearance. A four-bay timber verandah with a classical frieze and cornice extends across the recessed central section. Beneath the verandah is a tripartite window and an angled, panelled door entrance squeezed into the corner beside the advanced right-hand wing. Original forecourt railings, topped with ball finials to square piers, have been retained. The right-hand advanced wing features garage doors leading through to St. James’s Mews, with a tripartite sash window above. A bracketed cornice, parapet, and high kneelers are present on the gable at the left, along with roughcast brick chimney stacks set into the recently reslated roof.

The rear elevation is cement rendered and painted, with a cut-down chimney stack and modern replacement features; a Tudor window reported in a 1991 list description was not seen during a subsequent resurvey.

The interior retains features from a late Georgian remodelling. The original main entrance led into a narrow central passage with reeded architraves and segmental arches, featuring six-panel doors. The rooms to the right of the entrance hall have fine interiors, and the overall roof structure appears considerably earlier. The ground floor to the right retains panelled shutters and ceiling cornices, and one room contains an older fireplace surround with broach stops and carved spandrels characteristic of Glamorgan in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The former garage bay to the right has transverse cross beams, one of which has a corbel. The main first-floor room has an unusual ceiling effect dating from around 1700, but this has been partially obscured by the insertion of a partition wall. The ceiling is composed of six wells, with quatrefoils and foliated corners on the outer sections, and plain roundels in the central pair. A large room to the left has a three-well ceiling with a central rose. The roof is a five-bay structure of sufficient quality to suggest it may have originally had trapped purlins, a rare feature in Wales, potentially a derivative of the Midlands clasped purlin rather than a true trapped purlin. The roof structure is complicated by the reuse of timbers and the addition of strengthening ties and posts. The right-hand wing has an A-frame roof with massive purlins.