House - 17th/18th century, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
What catches the eye first is the roof, or rather its orientation.
Unlike most terraced houses, which present their eaves to the street, this early eighteenth-century building turns its gable end outward, so that the pitched slate roof runs away from you rather than across your line of sight. It is a small but persistent anomaly, the kind of thing that makes you stop and look twice at a streetscape you thought you already understood.
The house dates to around 1715, when it was built as one of a pair, and its history is legible in the fabric of the building itself. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records a structure that has survived remarkably intact across three centuries: lined-and-ruled rendered walls, a limestone plinth course at basement level, a render platband marking the first floor, and granite sills beneath timber sash windows whose glazing bars still follow the original Georgian proportions, nine-over-nine panes on the ground and first floors, nine-over-six on the second. The front door retains its moulded masonry surround, timber panelled door, and overlight, with a rendered step that has absorbed three hundred years of feet. Cast-iron railings enclose the basement area, where a separate half-glazed door once served the working life of the household below street level. The top gable-fronted storey was rebuilt around 2010, a modern intervention at the crown of an otherwise largely original building. Inside, corner fireplaces, downstand roof beams, and original timber panelling survive, details that are increasingly rare in Dublin's north city, where so many interiors of this period have been stripped or subdivided out of recognition.
The building sits in Dublin's north city, and the surrounding streetscape rewards attention at pavement level, where the shared chimneystack, the cast-iron rainwater goods, and the rendered walls connect this house to its paired neighbour in ways that are easy to overlook on a busy day. The basement area, enclosed by its iron railings, gives a sense of how these houses functioned as much as how they looked, a domestic architecture designed around hierarchy and the movement of goods as much as around reception rooms and street presence.