Detached Accommodation Block at Plas Menai

Cadw's description

Location

On the banks of the Menai Straits, on an access road from Caernarfon Road reached by a roundabout on the A487. The accommodation block is on rising ground at the SW of the site, close to the entrance.

History

Plas Menai was built for the Sports Council of Wales as a purpose-built national centre for water sports and outdoor pursuits in response to recommendations from the Welsh Joint Education Committee. Designed by Bill Davies of the Bowen-Dann-Davies Partnership. Construction commenced in 1978, and the centre opened in 1983. The separate accommodation block for staff was one of the first elements to be completed.

The accommodation is now used mainly for individuals and groups on training, development and experience programmes, and some refurbishment associated with this change of use took place in 2017-18 and 2019.

Exterior

The accommodation block comprises 9 houses with associated stores grouped around courtyards to provide shelter on the exposed site, the form and scale intended to echo the layout of a traditional farmstead. The design language is similar to that of the main centre, in its use of varied forms and mix of materials. The composition comprises a main enclosed courtyard to the NE, the SW range continuing to partially enclose a sheltered open space to the south. In the main courtyard the former principal’s house is at the NE corner, and former staff houses form the SE and SW ranges. The courtyard is enclosed on the NW side by a range of stores. Further stores/garage wrap around the SW corner of the complex.

Walls are roughcast, with some slate cladding to upper floors, particularly on the open S-facing elevations. Welsh slate roofs, often strongly overhanging and contributing to the overall picturesque composition in their varied forms, which are hipped or lean-to in places. Dark joinery detail as for the main centre. Natural stone retaining walls and boundary walls, including subsidiary enclosed spaces within the main courtyard.

The overall composition is characterised by varied massing and staggered lines, including an alternation of two-storeyed residential blocks and single-storeyed ancillary buildings in the main SE range. The former principal’s house is itself a complex composition, with external stair between lower gable and a stone retaining wall sheltered by the overhanging roof on the NW side, and with distinctive angled stone chimney clasped between the roof slopes of two blocks. Other domestic ranges simpler in form, but the whole is unified by coherent use of materials, forms, and detail, including dark timber windows (some replaced) with externally expressed mullions.

Interior

Where original layouts do survive, they are very simple. C21 alterations associated with refurbishment and changes of use (to houses 1, 2, 3 and 7) are not of special interest.

Reason for designation

Listed for its special architectural interest as part of the overall complex of buildings at Plas Menai, which together form a major work by one of the leading Welsh architectural practices of the post-war period. Like the main building, the accommodation block demonstrates the principles of the vernacular modernism developed by Bill Davies and the Bowen Dann Davies Partnership, fusing modernist design principles with sensitivity to climate and landscape context. The building is a fine example of this style, here beautifully matched to the intimate scale of domestic accommodation, making it an important exemplar of small-scale post-war housing development.