Survey Data
Reg No
50920167
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Artistic
Original Use
House
In Use As
Office
Date
1720 - 1740
Coordinates
315914, 233232
Date Recorded
09/09/2015
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Attached three-bay four-storey former townhouse over basement and with attic accommodation, built c. 1730, as a pair with No. 87 (50920168). Altered in nineteenth century and rebuilt behind principal north façade in late twentieth century. Mansard-style roof with red brick chimney to east party wall, concealed behind brick parapet with concrete coping and recent steel balustrade, concealed gutters with cast-iron hopper and downpipe breaking through to west. Red brick walls laid in Flemish bond, refaced to parapet with machine made bricks, granite platbands over ground, first and second floor level; render to basement with masonry stringcourse. Square-headed window openings, diminished to upper floors, with patent reveals, projecting granite sills and granite window-heads, brick voussoirs over third floor openings. Basement window openings faced with shallow segmental-headed openings, having mild-steel grilles affixed to reveals. One-over-one replacement timber sliding sashes with ogee horns. Square-headed door opening to western bay of principal elevation, with Gibbsian-style doorcase topped with moulded cornice. Replacement timber-panelled door with brass furniture and leaded cobwebbed overlight. Polychromatic tiles to entrance platform accessed via two granite steps from street. Plainly detailed recent timber-panelled door with toplight to basement located under entrance platform, accessed via recent steel staircase. Basement well to east enclosed by cast-iron railings topped with decorative finials, over granite plinth.
Appraisal
Dublin Civic Trust's "Survey of Gable-Fronted Houses and Other Early Buildings of Dublin" (2012) states "No. 88 is one of a pair of formerly gabled houses conforming to the high point of gabled building around the Green during its second wave of development in the early eighteenth-century. Both houses, No. 87 and No. 88, were depicted in their fully gabled form by James Malton in 1798 and in an 1832 print in the Irish Georgian Society Records. Therefore the gabled storeys are likely to have been built up c. 1840-50. One of the more curious features of the façade is the rearranged window lintels at first floor level, where the outermost bays feature wider lintels formerly used in a two-bay arrangement at this level, as seen on No. 84 further along the terrace. The central window is a later insert, probably carried out when the attic storey was built up. While the more recent works have disfigured the original roofline, the high quality façade materials and impressive doorcase make this a noteworthy survivor of the earlier house types that once characterised the Green. It is a handsome example of the restrained sophistication achieved in the gabled house typology by the second third of the eighteenth-century". Casey (2005) suggests that all but the façade was demolished in 1990.