Survey Data

Reg No

50010603


Rating

Regional


Categories of Special Interest

Architectural, Artistic, Historical


Original Use

House


In Use As

College


Date

1700 - 1750


Coordinates

315252, 234757


Date Recorded

11/11/2011


Date Updated

--/--/--


Description

Terraced two-bay three-storey gable-fronted townhouse, built c.1710, having undergone restoration c.2001. Now in use as educational centre, with recent shopfront inserted to ground floor. Cruciform-plan pitched artificial slate roof with gable to front (east) elevation, red brick chimneystack with clay pots to south party wall. Red brick parapet wall with squared granite coping. Replacement uPVC rainwater goods breaking through parapet to front elevation. English garden wall bond red brick walls to rendered granite ground floor. Gauged brick flat-arched window openings with brick reveals and granite sills. Replacement uPVC windows throughout. Original granite Gibbs doorcase comprising original timber panelled door with block-and-start surrounds and moulded lintel cornice forming support to replacement timber spoked fanlight within moulded archivolt with granite keystone. Timber panelled door giving access to draught lobby. Some egg-and-dart cornicing to ground floor interior. Doors open onto recent flagged path.

Appraisal

This rare example of a Dutch Billy house is an integral component of Dublin’s pre-Georgian architectural heritage. Despite the insertion of a modern shopfront and replacement windows, the building maintains a number of outstanding salient features including its cruciform roof structure, brick façade, gabled front and a superb Gibbsonian doorcase with an original door. Anchoring Capel Street in the era of the early eighteenth century, this building is an invaluable part of a streetscape now dominated by late eighteenth and nineteenth-century structures. Capel Street was laid out from about 1678 to link the Essex Bridge to the Great North Road.