[1][2][4] Described as a "magnificent, mid-Victorian mansion",[2] the house is a sandstone, one-storey bungalow with verandahs on the west and east sides; and features a service wing that extends to the south, plus two octagonal rooms with cone-shaped roofs.

[1][11] Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis bought 4.9 hectares (12 acres), most of the beach frontage at Bronte,[9] including the current house's site, at Nelson Bay in 1836.

This is possibly why the bay window in the dining room at Bronte House is fitted with unique sets of adjustable upper and lower shutters to control direct light.

However, there is no evidence that any other of the current planting dates from Mrs. Lowe's time here, although it is tempting to speculate that the brush box (Lophostemon confertus) on the edge of the gully to the north of the house and the brown pine (Podocarpus elatus) near the Port Jackson fig (Ficus rubiginosa) may have begun life as some of those seeds gathered on Leichhardt's expedition.

James E. Ebsworth was second commissioner of the Australian Agricultural Company, which had land grants in Port Stephens, the Hunter Valley and Peel River (around Tamworth) districts of NSW.

[1] For a time after World War II it was occupied by the Bronte branch of the Australian Red Cross (two rooms and the kitchen at the house's rear) and used as offices.

[14][1] In 1948 Austin Ebsworth, a bachelor, sold it to Waverley Council who seem to have acquired it as part of an exercise to consolidate the valley leading to Bronte Beach as parkland.

Its exterior form remained largely unchanged since the Holdsworth occupancy but the interior, with walls removed and bars and kitchens inserted, had been altered beyond recognition.

The original late Victorian mounded rockery, complete with weathered rocks and coral gathered from the nearby shore, has only recently been uncovered and this whole area has now largely been cleared, restored and re-planted.

A stand of poorly grown Hill's fig (Ficus hillii) along the southern boundary to Bronte Road has recently been removed and replaced, in accordance with the original Broadbent plan, with eighteen advanced native lilly pilly (Acmena smithii).

The final form of the garden will evolve over the next few years and many refinements remain to be made, but dramatic changes are unlikely to the rockery or to the northern gully where the bank has recently been planted with three and a half thousand kaffir lilies (Clivia miniata).

These will be shaded by a median canopy of tree ferns (Cyathea cooperi) and seventeen recently introduced specimens of the dwarf date palm, (Phoenix roebelenii).

The eastern (beach) side of the hose gives onto a grassed terrace apparently reformed with steps, a circular concrete pond or flower bed and extended by the construction of a stone retaining wall in the late nineteenth century.

[1] Beneath this wall to the east and north, down the steep rocky slope to the stream (now a storm water drain) is the elaborate rockery garden formed by Mrs. Lowe (see her own drawing album, Mitchell Library).

Mrs Lowe's orchard and vegetable garden occupied the lower part of the valley, now a public park much altered and replanted, (recent bush regeneration works are reintroducing native rainforest and coastal forest species).

The mounded rockery, complete with weathered rocks and coral gathered from the nearby shore on the bank east of the house, has been uncovered and replanted with a range of choice succulents.

[1] The overgrown plant material which has survived is possibly largely original, or at least of nineteenth century origin; Gymea lily (Doryanthes excelsa), Port Jackson figs (Ficus rubiginosa), Cook's and Norfolk Island pines (Araucaria columnaris and A.heterophylla), Bangalow palms (Archontophoenix cunninghamiana), Shell ginger (Alpinia zerumbet), spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum), bromeliads such as Billbergia, Aechmia and Neoregelia spp./cv.s etc.

There is an identical and equally large clump still growing in the grounds of Government House, Sydney, where the Lowes stayed for a short time after their arrival from England.

[1] However, there is no evidence that any other of the current planting dates from Mrs. Lowe's time here, although it is tempting to speculate that the brush box (Lophostemon confertus) on the edge of the gully to the north of the house and the brown pine (Podocarpus elatus) near the Port Jackson fig (Ficus rubiginosa) may have begun life as some of those seeds gathered on Leichhardt's expedition.

[1] Designed very much in the "picturesque" style, its features include romantic circular and hexagonal corner turrets, deep bay windows and fanciful pierced wooden tracery on both the eastern and western fronts.

In its use of Gothic details, asymmetrical forms, rusticated elements and castellation, as on the bargeboard above the front entrance, Bronte House departs from the simplicity and symmetry of earlier Georgian building types and hints at the rampant revivalism of the Victorian era.

Ornamental "cottages" of this type occur throughout England, Europe and the United States, even in Russia where the English architect Adam Menelaus created a magnificent one on the Gulf of Finland for Tsar Nicholas Ill.[1] Joan Kerr and James Broadbent in their book on Gothick Taste in the Colony of NSW described the house as:[1] "One of the larger of the cottage ornees of the 1840s is the extant Bronte House at Bronte (c. 1843), an amusing "Gothic-Italianate" design, described in its sale advertisement in 1849 as "in the Swiss style".

Some elements of his plan were implemented (eg: a replacement Norfolk Island pine was planted in the centre of the carriage loop, two evergreen /Southern magnolias/ bull bays (Magnolia grandiflora cv.)

Combined with poor maintenance, this ad hoc approach resulted in a garden that, when Schofield took possession (1994) was seriously neglected, wildly overgrown and almost completely shaded so that any new growth was dramatically restricted.

[1] The original late Victorian mounded rockery, complete with weathered rocks and coral gathered from the nearby shore, has only recently been uncovered and this whole area has now largely been cleared, restored and re-planted.

A stand of poorly grown Hill's fig (Ficus microcarpa 'Hillii') along the southern boundary to Bronte Road has recently been removed and replaced, in accordance with the original Broadbent plan, with eighteen advanced native lily pilly (Acmena smithii).

), Rosa rugosa cv.s, nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus), Gymea lilies (Doryanthes excelsa), ornamental grasses and other plants surrounds a metal semi-circular Victorian bench at the southern end of the eastern lawn, screening the fountain further east.

A frangipani on the house's north-western corner supports a climbing dragon fruit (Hylocereus undatus), and at its base a small path and steps are edged with two giant clam shells.

These will be shaded by a median canopy of tree ferns (Cyathea cooperi) and seventeen recently introduced specimens of the dwarf date palm, (Phoenix roebelenii).

Built in the "Gothick" taste so fashionable in the late 18th & early 19th centuries it is a perfect example of the cottage ornee, not a mansion but a romantic retreat from more formal city life.