Standing on high ground and commanding broad views both up and down the stream, the house is of truly baronial mien and Georgian character. Two flanking outbuildings, two and a half stories high, hip-roofed and dormered, some forty feet from each end of the main house and corresponding with it in character and construction, provide the servants' quarters and various domestic offices. Beyond the circle formed by the drive on the east or entrance front of the house and at some distance to either side are two barns. Thus the house becomes the central feature in a strikingly picturesque group of buildings having all the manorial impressiveness of the old Virginia mansions along the James River. The main house rises two and a half stories above a high foundation of hewn stone with iron-barred basement windows set in stone frames. It is of massive rubble-stone masonry, coated with yellowish-gray rough-cast and having heavy quoined corners of red brick, also a horizontal belt of the same material at the second-floor level, the keyed lintels of the large ranging windows, however, being of faced stone. Above a heavy cornice with prominent modillions springs the hipped roof, pierced on both sides by two handsome dormers and surmounted by a long, beautifully balustraded belvedere. Two great brick chimney stacks, one at each end of the building, with four arched openings near the top, lend an aspect of added dignity and solidity. The principal feature of the facade on both the east and west or river front is the slightly projecting central portion with its quoined corners, surmounting corniced pediment springing from the eaves, ornate Palladian windows in the second story and superb pedimental doorway in harmony with the pedimental motive above. Although the detail is heavy, and free use has been made of the orders, the work is American Georgian at its best and altogether admirable. The doorways of the two sides are similar but not the same, and a comparison, as found in another chapter, is most interesting.