Numbers 19 And 20 And Attached Railings And Piers

Numbers 19 and 20 are semi-detached houses located on Montpelier Villas in Brighton, built around 1845. They are constructed of stucco with a slate roof. The houses are two storeys high over a raised basement, featuring a two-window range on the Montpelier Villas side and a three-window range on the return side. Each house is wider at the back, with the entrance positioned in the resulting angle, and the front and back sections have separate roofs.

The front part of the houses has a ground floor decorated with banded rustication and a first floor with long and short quoins. The entrance is flat-arched, flanked by pilasters and consoles that support a first-floor balcony with a scalloped balustrade. There is an overlight above the entrance, and the basement and ground floor feature a segmental bay with flat-arched triple windows, topped by a shallow dome above the storey band. The basement windows have original 6/6 sash designs, and there is a bracketed balcony over the ground-floor windows with cast-iron railings and a fringed canopy. The first-floor windows are flat-arched with margin lights, while the westernmost first-floor window on the return side is blank.

The back part of the houses includes a full-height segmental bay with tripartite windows, maintaining the original 6/6 sash design for the basement and margin lights for the first floor. The eaves are supported by console brackets with paterae in the frieze, and the roof is hipped with stacks on both the front and back sections.

The entrance steps and front gardens are enclosed by cast-iron railings, which have brackets, and there is a square, stuccoed, corniced pier between each pair of houses on Montpelier Villas. The 20 houses that make up Montpelier Villas share a uniform design, making these semi-detached houses a rare find in Brighton. The railings were listed separately on August 20, 1971.