Survey Data

Reg No

50020088


Rating

Regional


Categories of Special Interest

Architectural, Artistic, Social


Previous Name

Olympia House


Original Use

House


In Use As

Office


Date

1700 - 1760


Coordinates

315590, 234052


Date Recorded

10/03/2015


Date Updated

--/--/--


Description

Attached pair of two-bay three-storey over basement former townhouses, built c.1730, remodelled c.1850, upper two floors added c.1890. Integrated laneway to east. Now in use as offices with recent shopfronts inserted to the ground floor. Pitched slate roof, hipped to east, with rendered chimneystack to rear, and red brick parapet having granite coping. Smooth rendered wall to first and second floors with bays flanked by fluted Corinthian pilasters supporting frieze and dentillated carved granite cornice. Red brick, laid in Flemish bond, to third and fourth floors to front. Square-headed window openings having granite sills, rendered architraves to first and second floors, and pediments and rendered aprons to first floor, with replacement uPVC windows throughout. Portion of original shopfront to west comprising panelled pilaster with fluted capital supporting timber fascia and cornice. Recent glazed and timber shopfront with moulded cornice, square-headed door openings with half-glazed and timber doors to east and west. Square-headed opening to laneway having decorative cast-iron security door with open transom and granite paving. Basement lights set in bronze glazing bars and portion of granite paving to front. Situated to north side of Dame Street.

Appraisal

Dublin Civic Trust's 'Survey of Gable-Fronted and Other Early Buildings of Dublin City' (2012), states 'Heavily modified over the centuries, this building was probably a pair of early three-storey townhouses, later adorned by a decorative stucco façade during the mid nineteenth-century and raised by a further two floors in the late nineteenth-century. Photographic evidence indicates that the uppermost two storeys were in place by the 1890s. This stretch of Dame Street was not redeveloped by the Wide Streets Commissioners in the late eighteenth-century, and therefore is highly likely to retain late medieval or post medieval fabric embedded within some of its buildings.' Its fine quality neoclassical ornament enhances the artistic value of the streetscape. The integrated laneway is unusual on Dame Street and appears from historic mapping to have survived in some form in this location since the eighteenth century. Dame Street derives its name from a dam which powered a mill on the River Poddle. Linking Dublin Castle with the Parliament House (now Bank of Ireland), it became a prominent thoroughfare during the eighteenth century.