Brook House, 17 Croft Road, Holywood, Co Down, BT18 0PB

Brook House is a three-bay two-storey-with-attic Victorian house built around 1870, located south of Croft Road in Holywood. The building displays an asymmetric layout with characteristic Victorian design and detailing. Although robust in character and significant locally, it is not among the finest examples of its type.

The house is L-shaped on plan with a full-height return and a single-storey flat-roof L-shaped extension to the rear, with a projecting porch to the south. The roof is hipped natural slate with blue and black angled ridge tiles, and rendered chimneystacks with castellated detailing to the caps. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods sit on rolled stone eaves. The walls are cement render with a chamfered plinth and plat-band between floors. Windows are segmental-headed one-over-one timber-framed sliding sash with horns and projecting masonry sills. Canted bays with three windows (those to left and right being slenderer) have moulded cornice and parapet. The entrance door has four raised-and-fielded bolection-moulded panels, brass door furniture and bell-pull, with a plain transom light over, and is accessed by two masonry steps.

The principal elevation faces south and has a projecting left bay and corniced porch at the re-entrant angle. Paired segmental windows run throughout, except for a canted bay to the ground floor left and a single window over the porch. The porch has an entrance door to the east and a slender window to the south. The west elevation is two windows wide to each floor. The north elevation is abutted by the full-height return to the left and the single-storey flat-roof extension to the right, with exposed sections being blank. The return is abutted by the single-storey extension at the gable. The left cheek has two windows to the first floor and attic, with an elongated modern timber window to the ground floor. The right cheek has two windows to the first floor and attic, abutted to the ground floor by the single-storey extension. The single-storey extension has a modern timber door to the north and west, and is abutted to the north by a lean-to with a corrugated tin roof. The east elevation has two windows to the first floor, a canted bay to the left, and a two-over-two window with horizontal glazing bars to the ground floor.

The house sits on a mature site enclosed by mature trees and hedgerow. A lawned garden surrounds the building on all sides, with a large garden to the south at a lower level, accessible via early masonry steps. A gravelled driveway to the east is accessed through modern cast-iron gates on modern smooth rendered gate piers. The property is bounded to the road by a replacement stone wall laid in courses.

The strip of land between High Holywood and Ballymenoch House began to be developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Griffith's Valuation map of the early 1860s shows Croft Road subdivided into saleable plots. The present house first appears, uncaptioned, on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1900–02 as one of a number of large villas in spacious grounds that had sprung up in the vicinity. The house first enters valuation records in 1869 as a newly-built vacant dwelling. The immediate lessor and perhaps also the developer was Baldwin J Mulligan, a partner in A W Craig & Co's weaving and spinning factory on the Falls Road. The house changed hands several times and eventually became the property of the Anderson family, who appear to have lived in it intermittently. The house was initially valued at £77 but was lowered to £67 in 1875, probably following an appeal.

Moritz Putheim was the first tenant recorded in valuation records, followed by Alexander Smith in 1880. Mr Smith complained to the Belfast Board of Guardians about pollution of a small stream in Holywood, probably Croft Burn which runs behind Brook House, by sewage matter from several houses in the neighbourhood. John Williams, a cotton handkerchief manufacturer, was the tenant by the time of the 1901 census, living with his wife, three adult children, a housemaid, and a cook. His son also worked in the cotton handkerchief industry as a salesman. John Williams was a partner in the firm McBride & Williams, cotton handkerchief and dress goods manufacturers of Ormeau Avenue. By 1907 the occupier was Roland Pears, a mechanical engineer and partner in Combe, Barbour & Co of the Falls Foundry. The house is not identifiable in the 1911 census but by 1912 was the home of John Anderson. The valuation was lowered to £47 in 1913. John Robb was the tenant in 1916 and Robert Callaghan in 1919. By the 1930s, Brook House was the home of J R Mitchell and his three sons. RAF Pilot Officer Lawrence Clement Mitchell died in February 1938 at an RAF base in Norfolk. William R D Mitchell later served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps and became a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon before moving to England. Giffney Mitchell continued to live at Brook House for some years and was a civil servant.