4139

 

II*  

Designated  

24/09/1985  

13/01/2003  

Plas Penisarnant  

 

Gwynedd  

Llanllechid  

Bangor  

Braichmelyn  

263079  

365070  

SW  

At the foot of Nant Ffrancon, between the A5 and the river Ogwen, in wooded grounds.  

Domestic  

 

Built by c1800 as Lady Penrhyn''''s dairy house - a show-piece of the Penrhyn estate thought to be the work of Benjamin Wyatt. The house today still accords remarkably with the descriptions of early C19 travellers who singled out for particular praise the slate-lined dairy itself, and the ''''elegant simplicity'''' of the sitting room for the reception of Lady Penrhyn''''s visitors. These early accounts detail 3 of the 4 ground-floor rooms - dairy, sitting room and kitchen (''''a model of convenience and neatness''''). The house was the stylish centrepiece of a specialist enterprise which also comprised kitchen and fruit gardens, and an apiary as well as a piggery, poultry yard, potato-steaming furnaces (providing fodder for the pigs?) and water-powered mills for breaking gorse and churning butter. Some of these ancillary buildings and their yards survive in part, together with traces of the garden layout.  

Now, as in the early C19, ''''the square house is surrounded by a piazza'''': 2-storeyed, square in plan with oversailing hipped heavy slate roof gathered to a central chimney. Slate-roofed veranda carried on cast-iron columns continues round all 4 sides of the house, which is symmetrical in 2 axes. Each principal elevation has central door, with window each side, and each side elevation has a small single-storeyed pantry projection with hipped roof. Although the house is white-rendered, this only partly conceals the original construction, in which the upper storey, and the pantry wings at least, are, remarkably, clad in large slabs of slate. In the principal elevations, openings all have pointed arched heads, with simple Y-tracery overlights to panelled doors in slate-hung reveals, and interlace tracer in the heads of the flanking windows, which are inward opening small-paned metal (perhaps brass?) casements. The dairy (to right of front door) is distinguished by the small ventilation holes drilled into its window sills. Upper windows are small-paned horizontally sliding sashes. Similar high-set small-paned windows in each pantry; the other side windows are 4-pane sashes, with blind window recesses in upper storey.  

Symmetrical quadrant plan, bisected by a through passage. Present main entrance gives access to what was probably originally conceived as the service half of the house, with dairy to the right, and kitchen (with pantry opening off) to the left. This has large fire-place in long internal wall, and is set back behind the staircase, making the room smaller than its counter-parts: it is possible that this was originally a service, or working kitchen as distinct from the show-kitchen described by early visitors. Dairy retains slate lining of walls (albeit painted over) and the remains of a sink set into the front window (it was noted as being ''''curiously supplied with fine water''''). Walls to rear hall also have slate-lined dado (now covered over); fine staircase with simple balusters and swept rail. SW half of house contains the sitting room, distinguished by panelled shutters to windows, and coloured glass in their tracery; the other room, with pantry opening off, may have been a show-piece kitchen originally, though it now has a small later C19 cast-iron fireplace. The kitchen as described by Richard Fenton was ''''a model of convenience and neatness…with furniture in the most appropriate style, of which the pendant rows of bacon are not the least becoming and valuable articles'''': the pantry retains not only original shelving and slate slabs, but also an impressive range of meat-hooks. Upper rooms are principally distinguished by the retention of 3 early fire-places: one is a hob grate with fine Neo-classical cast decoration; 2 others, identical, are to an unusual design, perhaps a precursor of the register grate intended to concentrate the draught. These also have embellished casting. Linen room, between the 2 front rooms retains original fitted cupboards and a folding table.  

Listed at grade II* as a remarkable estate ornamental farm, retaining with exceptional clarity and completeness its original form and detail. Part house, part working dairy, and clearly intended as a show-piece, it was a highly unusual enterprise combining arcadian style with practical functionalism and display, not least in its lavish use of slate both externally and internally. Surviving so little altered, it is eloquent testimony to the ambitions of the Penrhyn estate in its early progressive development.