The Grange, 80 Belfast Road, Antrim, BT41 1PQ, Co Antrim

The Grange is an early 20th century house built in 1916, designed in the Arts and Crafts style by the Belfast architect Thomas J. Houston (1879–1939), apparently for a Miss Thompson (recorded in the Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory of 1918 under the name of Mrs Thompson). The builder was E. Fraser of Belfast. The house retains its original architectural features throughout, though it has lost its original garden, setting, and front entrance gateway.

The building is a two-storey roughcast house of asymmetrical plan. Its walls are finished in wet-dashed roughcast render painted white, with black-painted half-timbering to the upper storey of the entrance bay and the upper floor of the end bay to the right. The timber framework is wooden-pegged, with three shaped timber brackets supporting the timberwork over the main entrance. The roofs are covered in red tiles with overhanging eaves on exposed rafter ends. Chimneys are rendered to match the main house, rectangular and clustered, with plain projecting cornices and original tall red pots.

The main entrance faces east within a projecting two-storey gabled entrance bay. The east elevation as a whole consists of a two-storey hipped block from which this gabled entrance bay projects, with the side of an open verandah extending to the left-hand extremity and a gateway to a single-storey coach yard to the right. The main entrance itself is an off-centre semi-elliptical archway with a recessed porch containing an original rectangular timber door, glazed and panelled, painted white, with glazed and panelled sidelights and an arched fanlight with radial and looped glazing bars. The porch floor is laid with red brickwork in a herringbone pattern, with a red-tiled skirting and a bow-fronted brickwork step approached by two red-tinted bowed concrete steps. To each side of the entrance bay are short angled returns at ground floor level, up to cill height, with narrow windows above, topped by small red-tiled roofs. The first floor windows immediately to left and right of the entrance bay break up through the eaves line, with dormer roofs swept over them. The ground floor of the main block to the right of the entrance bay has a battered (outward-leaning) profile, visible where the end bay steps back.

Windows to the first floor are rectangular timber small-paned casements and larger single-pane casements; ground floor windows are currently boarded up. Moulded timber drip mouldings are provided over the windows. Rainwater goods throughout are cast iron: gutters painted black, downpipes painted white, with moulded curving hoppers.

To the right of the right-hand end bay, the ground floor wall continues as a screen wall to the yard, containing a gateway of two square piers with overhanging caps and ramped copings, all in roughcast. To the right-hand extremity of the gateway is the end bay of the coach house, with battered buttresses to each side, a hipped roof tiled to match the main house with a deep overhanging eave, and one small-paned window. To the left-hand extremity of the east elevation is the open verandah, with a plinth wall extending to the left in roughcast with a ramped coping; the black-painted timber framework supports a hipped tiled roof with cast iron gutter and downpipe.

The south elevation has a two-storey semi-circular bay to the left of a recessed single-storey verandah, over which the main roof is swept down. The main roof above is surmounted by a broad tripartite chimney. The bay is roughcast to the ground floor, with half-timbering as elsewhere to the first floor, and a gabled half-timbered roof oversailing the curved bay, supported on angled timber struts. Windows are rectangular timber casements canted around the bay, with continuous semi-circular timber cills and heads. Moulded black-painted timber boxes contain roller sun awnings over each ground floor window, with box fronts fixed by angled iron bar struts. The verandah to the right is supported at the front on a pair of large solid black-painted wooden posts on roughcast plinth walls, with curved brackets to the timber beam above. A full-width sun awning of similar form to those on the bay is affixed to the front of this beam. The verandah floor is laid with red brickwork in herringbone pattern as at the east entrance porch, though the front edge is finished in tinted render rather than exposed brickwork — an apparent later repair to original brickwork that had crumbled. The verandah ceiling has exposed black-painted timber beams with whitened panels between. To the rear of the verandah is a rectangular glazed and panelled door (or French window) with glazed and panelled sidelights.

The west elevation is two storeys with an attic storey. Roofs here are a combination of hipped and gabled forms, tiled as elsewhere. Two first-floor windows break through the eaves line to form wall-head dormers, as on the entrance front, with a full dormer in the main roof above containing small-paned casements under a swept tiled roof with what appear to be lead-clad cheeks. Cast iron guttering serves the full dormer and the main roof, with cast iron downpipes and soil pipes. At the left-hand extremity of the main two-storey block is a rectangular glazed and panelled timber door flanked by a small rectangular window to each side. Extending to the left is a lower coach house and outbuildings with red-tiled roofs, overhanging eaves on deep projecting beams with boarded soffits, and timber boxed eaves to the corner of the outbuildings with roughcast soffit. The outbuildings retain a low roughcast chimney in the roof, an original flush iron rooflight, and cast iron rainwater goods. Projecting westward from the north end of the coach yard outbuildings is a later gabled additional block of lesser quality than the main complex, with roughcast walls, red asbestos tiles to the roof, cast iron gutters, and a later wooden rooflight in poor repair.

The north elevation of the outbuildings has roughcast walls with a projecting buttress to the left-hand extremity, a rectangular ledged timber door to the right-hand corner, and a pair of glazed rectangular ledged timber doors at high level giving access to a loft. The loft retains an original iron flush rooflight. The later additional block extends to the right-hand side. On the north elevation of the main block of the house, the tiled roof sweeps down low over a tall ground floor. In the upper portion of the roof is a hipped dormer with a tiled roof and tiled cheeks, containing a three-light small-paned timber casement to its front. In the lower portion of the roof below this dormer is a modern flush rooflight, described as the only modernisation evident on the exterior of the building. Cast iron gutters and downpipes serve this elevation. To the right-hand side of the wall is a rectangular opening with roughcast reveals and a black painted timber beam over, leading into a flat-ceilinged recess. This recess is surfaced in concrete, with smooth-rendered and white-painted walls, a black-painted plinth, and a smooth-plastered and white-painted ceiling. Five ledged timber doors give access from this recess to a coal house on the left, the main body of the house straight ahead, a generator room and a toilet to the right, and a wood store lying to the north of the main house wall. The yard is surfaced in concrete with roughcast walls.

On the west side of the yard is a single-storey roughcast block with a red-tiled roof and overhanging eaves on deep timber beams. It has a wide rectangular opening with a large rectangular ledged and braced horizontally sliding door running on overhead wheels and a runner that extends to the left over a segmental-arched hatch opening with a timber surround containing an arched timber sheeted bottom-hung door. To the right is a rectangular ledged timber door set in a timber frame leading into an outbuilding. This block returns forward to form the north side of the yard and contains a small rectangular window to the left of a wide rectangular timber ledged and braced door leading to a pair of stables.

The house stands well back from the main road within what was formerly its own grounds, now partly developed for housing, leaving a smaller garden than originally existed. The house is now reached by a common driveway marked at the main road by a pair of new gate piers that have replaced the original gateway. The driveway continues past the main entrance and around to the north side as an extensive area of hard standing. Beyond this on all sides, the garden consists of lawns with mature trees and shrubs. Standing to the west of the outbuildings is a derelict greenhouse, with utilitarian sheds of no architectural interest further to the north-west. The eastern boundary is marked by wooden fencing, the northern boundary partly by wire fencing, and other boundaries were not clearly defined at the time of survey due to building works in progress. The overall site, encompassing the house and the adjacent new houses under construction, is bounded along the main road to the south on each side of the gateway by a hedge with mature trees behind it.

The house was first recorded in the Irish Builder of 8 April 1916. It subsequently appeared on the Ordnance Survey map of 1962–3 for County Antrim (sheet 50). More recently it was owned by Jack Allen, Mayor of Antrim, until the mid-1990s, when it was sold for development following his death. Thomas J. Houston is discussed as a specialist in domestic architecture in an article by P. Larmour published in Perspective (the journal of the RSUA), Vol. 4, No. 2, November/December 1995, pages 53–56.