page_title: Stanthorpe Post Office
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Stanthorpe Post Office / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaque, Stanthorpe Post Office, 2015
context_page_description: Stanthorpe Post Office is a heritage-listed post office at 14 Maryland Street, Stanthorpe, Southern Downs Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by John Smith Murdoch of the Queensland Government Architect's office and was built by D. Stewart and Co in 1901. It was added to the Australian Commonwealth Heritage List on 22 June 2004.
context_section_description: Stanthorpe Post Office is at 14 Maryland Street, corner Railway Street, Stanthorpe.
  It was built in 1901 in an informal Arts and Crafts style mixed with Edwardian Baroque Revival elements.
  The original building was one storey in height with a four-storey tower, consisting of:
  Structural frame: cavity brick. The base is rock faced coursed locally sourced granite and tuckpointed red brick with concrete piers.
  External walls: Brick with extensive cladding in textured stucco.
  Internal walls: Altered around 1963 with windows to north wall infilled.
  Floor: Timber framed
  Ceiling: beaded timber lining boards to porch soffits, v-jointed tongue and groove boarded trussed ceiling.
  Roof: half hipped form, of uncorrugated metal sheet with crimped joint coverings, beaded timber lining boards, pyramidal vented cupola.
  Flagpole with lightning conductor
  Rendered sills
  The site has an extensive and largely unpaved yard area accommodating a car park, warehouse-depot for mail deliveries and  a telecommunications tower.
  The Maryland Street front is a basically symmetrical composition, but is confounded by the placement of a tall clock tower on the corner. The tower is formally linked to the postal hall elevation by a parapet-entablature line that extends an otherwise symmetrical parapet behind the main post hall breakfront. The Post Office has two prominent entrances, through arched corner porches to either side of the post hall wall and main window. This is treated as a breakfront and quasi-pediment, moulded at the top in a red brick cornice, and broken at its base line by a royal coat of arms and the keystone and upper arch of the central window. The window itself has a tympanum inside the arch and a multiple-paned main light, and is flanked by two tall rectangular windows with squared tympani above each light. The whole forms a Serlian group, framed and bisected by plain brick piers and two recessed piers below the main arch springing point, with brick mouldings suggesting a Tuscan order. The frieze below the pediment, matched by a frieze at the neighbouring tower base, is a combination of exposed brickwork and rough textured stucco, of a type soon seen in many Arts and Crafts houses in the capital cities from the 1900s on.
  These materials are combined again in the parapet behind the pediment and the tower base, and in spandrels over the entry arches. On the Railway Street side the stuccoed frieze is punctuated by a series of diagonally angled struts supporting a broad eave, and a stretch of metal-clad roof in a catslide descending from a hipped gable between two stub-parapets. This theme is repeated on the north-east end of the Maryland Street elevation, where an exposed hipped gable flanks one side of the main breakfront. Both these elements recur in later Queensland Post Office designs such as Wooloongabba Post Office (1904) and Mount Morgan Post Office (1910) (in the masonry designs) and Cooroy Post Office of 1912-13 (in the timber series).
  The clock tower is a plain stuccoed shaft, recalled in TR Hall's Sandgate Town Hall of 1911. The name is lettered 1/3 the way up the shaft. Tall vent windows topped with brick balconettes and corner piers capped with rounded red-brick frame a narrower oblong mass housing the clocks, which terminated with a brick cornice and a recessed arcade below a low-pitched pyramidal roof and louvred vents.
  To the north there is a single level 1963 brown brick service wing addition, subsequently further extended during the late 1980s. It comprises mail delivery work areas, sorting spaces and additional post office box accommodation to Maryland Street. The west elevation of the original building comprises a timber-framed and weatherboard-clad addition, infilling what is thought to have been a previously open verandah flanked by brick lavatories. The brick enclosure to the south west has been extended by several courses of brickwork at an unknown date, and a small window removed and patched. The original paired doors to the original outer wall and one of the flanking windows removed. This is thought to have been 
caption: Information plaque, 2015
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