Beechwood House is a small mansion set in extensive gardens, built in the late 1870s. The house has a U-shaped plan, the front range orientated east-west and facing south, with two long rear wings at right angles, extending to the north. It comprises two storeys with a cellar and attic, and is constructed of brick, faced externally with ashlar Bath stone with rusticated ashlar detailing.

Built by Habershon, Pite and Fawkner, architects of Cardiff and Newport, for George Fothergill, a tobacco manufacturer and former Mayor of Newport. Bought in 1900 by Newport Borough Council who opened the 31 acre grounds as a public park; the house was later used as a First World War convalescent home and in 1920s it became a refreshment centre for park visitors. The house was damaged by fire in 1992; the boarded-up. Following a successful bid by Newport City Council for a total of £4.2 million of funding, construction work started in October 2006 to redevelop Beechwood House as an Entrepreneurship Centre.

Beechwood House is a small mansion set in extensive gardens, built in the late 1870s. The house has a U-shaped plan, the front range orientated east-west and facing south, with two long rear wings at right angles, extending to the north. It comprises two storeys with a cellar and attic, and is constructed of brick, faced externally with ashlar Bath stone with rusticated ashlar detailing.

Externally little of the house was visible during the site visit, due to extensive scaffolding which had been further enclosed within plastic sheeting, while internal viewing was severely restricted by dense interior scaffolding. The need for the scaffolding was due to the condition of the property, which was badly damaged by fire in the 1990s and since which it has deteriorated, in particular through water damage caused by rain entering through the damaged roof.

The house is entered via a central door in the south elevation, covered by a large, flat roofed porch. The supports consist of eight Corinthian columns, grouped three at each outer corner and one at each of the back corners, sat on plain square pedestals, with ovolo mouldings at the base of the column and capitals decorated with leaves, volutes and fleuron. Above is a simply moulded, narrow entablature and a small parapet. The whole covers a short flight of stone steps leading up to the door (now boarded over) and a terrace, surrounded by a low stone wall with wrought iron railings, although a photograph of the house taken in the early 20th century shows a stone balustrade.

The entrance enters a hallway with a highly decorative, polychrome tiled floor, and a plaster cornice with dentillated decoration. In the north-west corner is an open well, stone staircase, with the remains of wrought iron balusters in a floral design. At the base of the stair is a large stone newel, with simple ovolo mouldings to the top and base of the shaft.

Four reception rooms are arranged asymmetrically off the hall. All have plaster cornices surviving, the front left and the centre right being wide bands with elaborate foliate decoration, the front right room having a narrower cornice with egg-and-dart decoration, and the rear right room again with a narrow band with a simpler, more naturalistic floral design. The fireplace surrounds and grates have been stripped from all of these rooms, but they retain six-panelled doors, each of the panels decorated by a central field with raised pyramidal decoration and bolection moulding, with brass knob handles and door plates. All these rooms are lit by full height, two over one pane sash windows with panelled reveals and soffits and moulded architraves, three in each of the front left and right rooms, and the central right room set into canted bays.

At thee rear of the right side of the house is a further large reception room, possibly used as a garden room, as it was lit by seven full length sash windows of a similar style to those found in the front rooms. Again the fireplace had been removed, but it retains its wide cornice with elaborate foliate decoration.
To the rear left side of the house are a number of lower status rooms, reached via a small lobby, again with a polychrome tile floor laid in an complex geometrical pattern with a single, central, cobalt blue tile. These rooms have again had their fireplaces removed, and are tiled more simply with quarry tiles in a black and red chequered pattern.

The cellar is accessed by stone steps from these rooms, and mirrors the layout of the front range of the house, largely not extending below the rear wings. The partition walls are of a mixed stone and brick construction with the openings having brick dressings, and the floors are laid with large stone flags. Three of the rooms are fitted with extensive slate shelving held by brick supports, while another has a series lower level brick supports remaining, probably for carrying slate worktops, which have been removed.

Three cellar rooms have openings to ducts or passages running through the thickness of the exterior walls. The lack of any other sources of natural light suggests that these may have originally had the purpose of providing this, possibly through grilles set in the ceilings of the passageways which have since been blocked. The design of the openings in relation to the length of the passageway however, means they would be inefficient in relaying the light to the room, and an alternative suggestion is that they housed heating ducts, or other service pipes.

The first floor is accessed by the main staircase in the hall, which rises to a landing with two triple arcades, formed of moulded, round-headed arches with central keystones, and moulded capitals. That on the east side accessed a north-south corridor, while that to the west was infilled with wooden panelling with lights within the arched heads. Lightening the stairwell on the north side are two tall, round-headed windows with simple timber tracery forming two round headed lights with a roundel above.

The first floor rooms are lit by sash windows, some one-over-one pane without glazing bars, some two-over-one pane, and some two-over-two pane examples. In all the upper pane is segmentally arched into the frame, rather than being square-headed, and they have simply moulded surrounds. The doors are six panelled, with plain panels framed by bolection moulding, brass knob handles and door plates, and the plaster cornices are simpler than those found on the ground floor, being formed of bands of ogee and ovolo mouldings.

Two fireplaces of 1940/50s date survive, one a timber arc deco style surround now fitted with an electric fire, the other a beige tiled fire surround with its grate removed. Light fittings which remain, in the form of electric pendants and switches also date stylistically to the mid 20th century, and plaster-board partition walls have been inserted to sub-divide one of the rooms to the rear on the right side of the house, providing a small bathroom. Of the original smaller rooms, one appears to have acted as a linen closet, being furnished with floor to ceiling cupboards, while the other two may have been dressing rooms (although neither have private access from one other the larger bedrooms), or original, unfitted, bathrooms.

In general the very poor state of repair of many of the rooms, together with the comprehensive stripping of most of the fittings, made interpretation of the functionality of individual rooms difficult.

To the north-west of the main house is a service range, comprising a series of carriage sheds and a coach house. The carriage shed, possibly later garages, is a single storey, brick built structure open to the north, with a lean-to slate roof. The adjacent coach house is a two storey building, also of brick, with segmentally-headed window and door openings, and a hipped slate roof. There is a double width doorway which has been bricked up, and over the main carriage entrance to the right (which has itself been enlarged, cutting across a smaller blocked opening) is a gabled, dormer loft opening. All the openings in this range are now boarded over, and access to the interior was not possible.


RCAHMW, 2010.