3 Tudor Park, Holywood, Co Down, BT19 0NX

A three-storey multi-bay attached stucco house in Tudor-Revival style, built around 1850. The house is located in secluded grounds off Tudor Oaks Road to the east of Holywood, on elevated land with views towards Belfast Lough. It forms part of a significant group of six houses built by Henry Murney, a prosperous tobacco merchant with a business in High Street, Belfast, and together they are known as Tudor Park.

The building is U-shaped on plan, comprising a rectangular front block with an abbreviated gabled return extending to the rear, and a double-height garage to the rear. The pitched natural slate roof has blue and black angled ridge tiles, raised stone skews and kneelers. Tall stone chimneystacks feature chamfered stalks to suggest individual flues, with ovolo-moulded heavy plinths. The rear chimneys are rendered with chamfered stalks, simple plinths and tall terracotta pots. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods are mounted on drive-in brackets.

The walling is smooth rendered stucco with quoins over a chamfered plinth. Windows are timber-framed sliding sash in simple chamfered surrounds with chamfered sills. The first-floor windows are 8/8 sash, while dormer windows are 1/1 or 2/2 sash.

The principal elevation faces northeast and comprises a two-storey entrance bay offset to the left of centre, flanked by two gabled bays (each single window wide), with the extreme left bay being two windows wide. The porch contains a bolection-moulded six-panel door with brass furniture and is lit from the east and north.

The southeast elevation is abutted by a three-storey slightly recessed rear wing (creating the U-shaped plan) with a 4/4 sash window to the first floor. This section is abutted by a projecting double-height smooth rendered modern garage with an oculus window above an up-and-over garage door, with an exposed gable section containing a diminutive 2/2 sash window to the second floor. The southwest elevation is abutted by an adjoining building. The northwest elevation comprises a central projecting gabled bay and single openings to the flanking bays: the left bay has a tripartite multi-pane window, and the right bay a simple 2/2 sash window (replaced in 1941). The gable at ground floor contains a multi-lit window and a diminutive 2/2 window to the second floor.

The house is set on elevated grounds overlooking Belfast Lough, with a lawned front and gravelled drive accessed from Tudor Oaks Road. The mature site is surrounded by boundary trees and hedgerow, and once extended down to the Bangor Road below.

According to historical records, this area of Holywood became popular with wealthy businessmen and merchants in the 1830s and 1840s. The "triangle of land bounded by Bangor Road, Victoria Road and Croft Road" was particularly favoured for its higher ground, which allowed substantial villas to be sited within four or five acres of prime woodland, arranged to resemble small country estates, and crucially, offered unrivalled views of Belfast Lough and the County Antrim hills without excessive exposure. The district became unofficially known as "High Holywood".

The three pairs of semi-detached houses comprising Tudor Park first appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1858, together with a gate lodge on the Bangor Road entrance to the demesne. The gate lodge and castellated gates were lost when a private housing estate was built in the grounds in the 1970s.

The house is listed in Griffith's Valuation (1856-64) as the property of John Higginson, leased from Henry Murney, and valued at £62. Successive occupiers through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included Jane Ashmore (1863), Mrs Ferguson (1879), James McKittrick (1887), Colonel Harrison (1900), Thomas Maguire (1909, listed as a solicitor in the Ulster Towns Directory of 1910), and George Henderson (1929). The valuation decreased by degrees to £45 by 1891, perhaps indicating lack of repair. Following Henry Murney's death in 1907, Frederick Hoey became the immediate lessor by 1909. The building underwent extensive, expensive and co-ordinated repairs between 1989 and 1992.

The house remains a fine, well-preserved example of the type built by Belfast's wealthy merchants in the mid-nineteenth century and is representative of Holywood's expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although its setting has been compromised by modern development, the group of six houses in Tudor Park retains notable architectural and historical significance.