House - 17th/18th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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House – 17th/18th century, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

On Aungier Street in Dublin's south city, a single early townhouse survives where an entire row of gabled houses once stood.

Number 31 is the last of its kind on this stretch, its neighbours having been demolished in the 1970s in the kind of clearance that reshaped so much of inner Dublin during that decade. What remains is a two-bay, three-storey rendered former townhouse, though even that description requires a small qualification: the third floor and roof were removed around 1970, so the building now stands a little shorter than it once did, truncated just before the roofline that would have connected it visually to the gabled terrace it once belonged to.

The building's age is difficult to pin down precisely, but certain features suggest it dates to the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The closet return, a full-height projection at the rear that housed small ancillary rooms off each main floor, is a characteristic element of early Dublin domestic architecture, and its presence here points to origins well before the Victorian era. The traditional fenestration pattern visible on the rear façade, meaning the arrangement and proportions of the windows, reinforces that reading. Inside, a substantial amount of original joinery survives, which is quietly remarkable given the building's chequered later history and the fact that a modern shopfront now occupies the ground level, as it does on so many former townhouses along busy commercial streets.

Aungier Street runs south from the junction with Cheesemarket and Whitefriar Street, and Number 31 sits as an end-of-terrace property, which means its side elevation is exposed in a way that a mid-terrace house would not be. That exposed flank, combined with the absence of its former neighbours, makes it easier to read the building's form from the street. The shopfront at ground floor means the interior is not publicly accessible in the conventional sense, but the rear façade, with its older fenestration intact, rewards a closer look if access allows. Those interested in the grain of pre-Georgian and early Georgian Dublin will find this a useful, unassuming example of what the city's domestic streetscape once looked like at a more modest, everyday scale.

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