In around 1740 the estate was bought by William Reeve, a Bristol industrialist, who converted the first house to a service wing and built a new mansion next to it.

In the 1760s, Reeve embellished the estate with the construction of a stable block in the form of a mock castle, now the Black Castle public house; an entrance archway, the Arno's Court Triumphal Arch; a bathhouse with a colonnaded frontage; and by giving the front of his new house an early Gothick makeover.

Andrew Foyle, in his Somerset: North and Bristol volume in the Pevsner Buildings of England series, revised and re-issued in 2011, suggests the Gothic work may have been by the Bristolian builders, Thomas and James Paty.

[a][1] Developments included a stable block in a castellated style, constructed from compressed slag generated from Reeve's metal furnaces,[3] and an entrance arch which contains some genuine medieval fragments.

[1] The stables, now a public house, were separated from the court by a road widening scheme for the A4, and the arch was moved to its present location.