Survey Data

Reg No

50920312


Rating

Regional


Categories of Special Interest

Architectural, Artistic, Historical


Original Use

House


Date

1765 - 1775


Coordinates

316321, 233283


Date Recorded

21/10/2015


Date Updated

--/--/--


Description

Terraced three-bay three-storey townhouse with attic and basement, built c. 1770 as a terrace comprising Nos. 16-18 (50920310-2) and remodelled c. 1906. Gabled to southern two bays of principal (east) elevation, bowed northern bay to rear (west). Currently disused. Mansard slate roof with pitched and hipped roof over bowed bay to rear, with rendered chimneystacks with red brick dressings and lipped yellow clay pots to party walls. Dutch gable to southern two bays surmounted by triangular red brick dentilled pediment with painted rendered tympanum. Attic dormer to northern bay over projecting red brick cornice over cogged stringcourse. Eaves mounted uPVC gutters with downpipe to southern gable. Red brick walling laid in Flemish bond over painted rendered walling to ground floor with rendered platband stringcourses. Unpainted render to southern gable and rear. Largely square-headed window openings with projecting painted masonry sills. Those to first and second floors with patent reveals and brick voussoirs; those to ground floor with bolted moulded reveals. Round-headed window opening to first floor of northern bay. Moulded rendered surround to square-headed attic dormer. uPVC casement windows throughout. Round-headed door opening to north-central bay with rendered doorcase comprising panelled pilasters rising to foliated console brackets supporting fluted frieze surmounted by fanlight over nine-panelled timber door with brass furniture opening onto granite entrance platform, ramped to street level, with cast-iron bootscraper. Basement wells to north and south enclosed by cast-iron railing on granite plinths. Street fronted onto the eastern side of Ely Place Upper.

Appraisal

Dublin Civic Trust's 'Survey of Gable-Fronted Houses and Other Early Buildings of Dublin' (2012) states ‘Laid out c. 1770 and named after Viscount Loftus of Ely, this group of houses on Ely Place was built by Nicholas Trench and remain the earliest buildings on the street. Deceptively Edwardian in appearance, the three houses date to the laying out of the street in the late eighteenth-century, however all were heavily remodelled in the opening years of the twentieth century under the supervision of the noted architect Thomas Manly Deane, who lived and worked in the adjacent No. 15 from 1897 to 1908 (since demolished). The houses 'plot divisions do not correspond with the larger mansions depicted on Bernard Scalé’s 1770s map of Dublin, which may account for the unorthodox disposition of accommodation inside No. 16 and No. 17 due to subsequent alterations. The group was remodelled by Thos. Dockrell & Sons in 1906, where Deane added picturesque mansard roofs and Dutch gables in a curious reinterpretation of the early eighteenth-century ‘Dutch Billy’ while retaining their original red brick facades to the lower levels. The interior detailing of all houses is somewhat antiquated and unusual in layout for their time and may have been built with a specific function in mind. Based on this, and the idiosyncratic remodelling executed by Deane, it is possible the houses were originally gable-fronted, constituting the last gasp of the gabled tradition in Dublin in the late eighteenth-century.'