Woburn House, Ballywalter Road, Drumfad, Millisle, Newtownards, Co Down, BT22

Woburn House is a large, sprawling two-storey Italianate mansion dating to around 1865, located on the west side of Ballywalter Road approximately one mile south of Millisle on the County Down coast. It was designed by John McCurdy of Dublin for George Orr Dunbar, a former Member of Parliament and Lord Mayor of Belfast.

The house was built on the site of an earlier residence. A substantial house named Woburn had previously been constructed between 1797 and around 1830 (possibly circa 1815) by John Gilmore Dunbar, George's uncle, as a summer residence. The Dunbar family had owned the townlands of Drumfad and Ballyrolly since the eighteenth century. John Gilmore Dunbar died childless in 1846, and the property passed to his nephew George Orr, who adopted the Dunbar surname in accordance with his uncle's will. George rebuilt Woburn House in the 1860s as an Italianate mansion, though it is uncertain how much of the previous building's fabric survived the reconstruction. George died in 1875. Following the deaths of his daughter Georgiana Dunbar-Buller and her husband Charles in the early 1920s, the house passed to Reynell James Pack-Beresford, a distant cousin through Georgiana's mother's family. It remained in Pack-Beresford ownership until the 1950s, when death duties forced Arthur Reynell Pack-Beresford to sell. In 1956, the Northern Ireland Ministry of Finance purchased Woburn House and converted it to a boys' borstal; it later became a training centre for prison officers.

The building has a complicated plan form, apparently originating as a roughly T-shaped structure with a main wing running north-west to south-east and a shorter wing running north-east to south-west. The shorter wing has since been greatly extended to the south-west, and modern structures have been added to the rear. The rendered and painted façade is topped by a hipped roof with Bangor blue slate and rendered, corbelled chimneys. Most windows retain their original frame styles but now incorporate security features including toughened glass.

The long main wing features a central three-storey square projecting tower. At ground level, the tower contains a port-cochere with semicircular arches and rusticated render with simple decoration to the arch heads and courses between floors. The first floor displays Serliana windows on each face, with Ionic columns serving as mullions and square Ionic columns at the wall corners. The second floor has twinned semicircular arch-headed windows on each face with composite order columns as mullions and at corners, with brackets and a pediment; the window on the south-west (rear) face of the second floor is false. The tower culminates in a hipped and leaded pavilion roof with pediments. A balustraded course runs between the first and second floors and is carried as a parapet around the rest of the original building, below which runs a dentilled cornice.

Windows to the remainder of the north-east face of the long wing are all sash with decorative brackets and cornices to those on the first floor, and similar brackets supporting a segmental pediment to the shorter windows on the second floor. The north-west end of the north-east façade of the long wing finishes with a full-height curved bay containing three windows on each floor. A similar curved bay appears at the south-east end of the long wing. The long wing intersects at the south-east with the shorter wing running north-east to south-west. This wing generally follows the style of the rest of the building, though two windows on the south-east façade are tripartite, and there are smaller single-storey curved bays on the south-east and north-east façades, both with balustraded parapets. All windows on this wing rest on cill courses with supporting brackets and a string course below first-floor brackets. A decorated doorway to the far left of the south-east façade features a semicircular-headed fanlight, sidelights, an arched cornice (partly), and brackets. To the south-west façade of the short wing, a single-storey gabled section was added at a later date, possibly around 1890–1900, and has been modernised in recent times. The hipped roof of the short wing contains many small dormers with curved (segmental) roofs, which form segmental pediments over their small sash windows.

Since conversion to institutional use, the building has been greatly extended and thoroughly modernised internally. The rear of the entire building has been extensively extended in recent times with many unsympathetic functional-looking one and two-storey structures featuring a mixture of flat and gabled roofs. The immediate surrounding grounds have been extensively developed, with modern houses and other structures now standing to the north, south and west of the building within the former house grounds. The property remains in government ownership.