Martello House, 13 Bangor Road, Holywood, Co Down, BT18 0NU

Martello House is one of a matched pair of large semi-detached houses built around 1835, located on the south side of Bangor Road, Holywood. It is a two-storey, three-bay house with an attic, L-shaped on plan, with a lower two-storey mezzanine return set into the re-entrant angle. The house has recently been restored, leaving much of its original fabric intact. Together with its neighbour, Clifden, it represents one of the earliest examples of the semi-detached house form in this part of Holywood.

The roof is hipped and covered in natural slate with angled clay ridge tiles. The chimneystacks are rendered with moulded caps and octagonal clay pots. Rainwater goods are ogee-profile cast iron and run along projecting stone eaves, which are supported on a frieze of carved brackets set over a moulded architrave. External walls are finished in ruled-and-lined cement render.

Windows to the principal elevations are two-over-two timber sash windows, horizontally divided, with projecting sandstone sills. Ground floor windows have moulded architraves; first floor windows are framed by a string course that rises over each window head. Windows to the rear and return vary: one-over-one sashes to the rear, six-over-six to the return, and three-over-six to the attic level, with the exception of two plain glazed modern insertions.

The garden-facing elevation faces northwest and is three windows wide. The entrance elevation faces southwest and is four openings wide on each floor. The entrance is offset to the left and sheltered beneath a masonry porch with square piers and responds, and a plain entablature whose cornice and blocking course are lead-capped. The door itself has six raised-and-fielded panels and a bronze knocker, and is set within an elliptical arch with a segmented fanlight. It is flanked by multi-pane sidelights with timber aprons, all divided by clustered timber pilasters. To the ground floor left of the entrance is a canted bay window in the traditional arrangement of three one-over-one sashes with horns. The two windows to the right have been extended down to ground level and fitted with three-part stacked sashes. The southeast gable has two modern ground floor window insertions and a replacement sash at first floor in an original opening. The northeast elevation and its returning section are partially abutted by the lower rear return. The exposed section of the main house at this point has two attic windows and modern sliding patio doors to the right side. The returning rear elevation facing east is obscured by the lower return (except at attic level, which was not inspected). The return is lit on the east side only by two sash windows to each floor, asymmetrically arranged, and is completely abutted at the north by the adjoining house.

To the rear of the property is an L-shaped single-storey outbuilding of random rubble stone, partially rebuilt, with brick-dressed openings and a natural slate roof, now converted to offices. The house sits back from Bangor Road on an elevated site with mature gardens to the front. The rear portion of the site has been developed with a modern house and is overlooked by the shell of a windmill. Access is via a sweeping gravel drive, the entrance to which is marked by two polygonal rendered piers — part of a group of three, the central pier being shared with the neighbouring property — with moulded caps and cast-iron gates.

The pair of houses was among the first to be built in this part of Holywood and appear to have been constructed between 1836 and 1840, making them early examples of the semi-detached house form. A copy lease of 1850 records that a Hugh Stewart "erected two dwelling houses...with office houses in the rere thereof closely adjoining each other covered by the same roof and being separated by a partition wall." Stewart appears to have come into ownership of the land — known as Windmill Field — in 1836. The houses are shown on the Townland Valuation town plan of Holywood, dated by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland to around 1834, but do not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1834. According to information supplied by the owner of the neighbouring property, Clifden, Hugh Stewart had a significant influence on the development of Holywood, having built a bathhouse to attract the first seasonal visitors, the first Post Office, and a large number of houses including the older part of the Crescent.

Martello House appears in the Townland Valuation as the property of a Mr Smyth — a house, office and yard valued at £30. The 1850 lease records that Hugh Stewart sold the house to John Murphy in 1848, suggesting Mr Smyth may have been a tenant. The building appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, and in Griffith's Valuation of 1856 to 1864 it is listed as the property of Jane Ashmore, leased from William Linden, comprising a house, offices, yard and lawn, with the buildings valued at £40, later raised to £47. By 1863 the house was vacant, but after 1867 the occupier is recorded as William Linden, with the house leased from the Representatives of John Hunter. John Burnett, listed in the proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society in 1882 and 1889, is recorded as occupier in 1880, and from 1892 William Shaw is in residence. That same year he successfully applied for a reduction in valuation to £43. By 1902 the property was leased from the representatives of M. Linden, but by 1924 William Shaw himself had become the immediate lessor. The valuation was raised from £43 to £50 in 1923, and in 1927 another member of the Shaw family took over the house. William Shaw was a partner in the firm of Messrs Shaw and Jamison, wholesale druggists of Town Hall Street, Belfast. On his death in 1926 he bequeathed £1,000 to the Royal Victoria Hospital to endow a ward to be known as the "Shaw Holywood" ward.