Survey Data
Reg No
12000044
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Artistic
Original Use
House
Historical Use
Print works
In Use As
Office
Date
1700 - 1839
Coordinates
250563, 155878
Date Recorded
16/06/2004
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Terraced five-bay three-storey house with dormer attic, extant 1839, on a rectangular plan. Occupied, 1901; 1911. Sold, 1926. Renovated, 1996, with replacement shopfronts inserted to ground floor. Replacement pitched artificial slate roof behind parapet with ridge tiles, coping to gables including coping to gable (south) with rendered chimney stack to apex having corbelled stepped stringcourse below capping, and concealed rainwater goods. Rendered walls with rendered coping to parapet. Segmental-headed central door opening in square-headed recess with cut-limestone step threshold, and timber surround with dentilated ogee-detailed cornice on blind frieze framing glazed timber panelled door having overlight. Square-headed window openings (upper floors) with part rendered cut-limestone sills, and moulded rendered surrounds with hood mouldings on blind friezes framing six-over-six timber sash windows without horns having part exposed sash boxes (first floor) or six-over-six timber sash windows having part exposed sash boxes (top floor). Street fronted with footpath to front.
Appraisal
A house representing an important component of the eighteenth-century built heritage of Kilkenny with the architectural value of the composition, one 'which by its dignity and situation may well have been one of the old city mansions' (Phelan 1968, 9), confirmed by such attributes as the compact plan form centred on a restrained doorcase showing stained glass heraldry; the uniform or near uniform proportions of the openings on each floor with those openings showing sleek "stucco" refinements; and the parapeted high pitched roof. Although recently much modified at street level, the form and massing survive intact overhead together with quantities of the original fabric, both to the exterior and to the interior, including shimmering glass in hornless sash frames, thus upholding much of the character or integrity of a house making a pleasing visual statement in High Street. NOTE: 28 High Street was the printing office of "The Moderator", a conservative biweekly newspaper established (1813) by Abraham Denroche (d. 1860) and later known as "The Kilkenny Moderator", whose editors included the antiquarian John George Augustus Prim (1821-75), the historian Standish James O'Grady (1846-1928), and Michael Wilton Lalor (1847-1914). The newspaper, like many others with a unionist bias, fell out of fashion following the foundation of the Irish Free State (1922) and ceased publication in 1926.