Glen House, Mountain Road, Newtownards, Co. Down, BT23 4UL

Glen House is a large two-storey house dating from around the 1880s, located on Mountain Road at the northern edge of Newtownards, set between Mountain Road and Crawfordsburn Road in deceptively rural-looking surroundings. The house stands on a raised artificial mound accessed by front steps.

The building is essentially square in plan with shallow projections to the rear. It is finished in plain render with a chamfered plinth and is topped by a hipped roof clad in Bangor blue slates with red clay ridge tiles and two centred greyish-yellow brick chimney stacks. The roof has a slight overhang with a corbelled eaves course, and the property features cast iron rainwater goods.

The south-facing front facade displays considerable decorative detail. At ground floor level, a central timber-panelled door with a semicircular arched fanlight is flanked by two three-sided single-storey bays with tall segmental arch-headed sash windows on each face. The door and fanlight are encased with panelled pilasters with corbelled bases that support tall decorative brackets. These brackets support a cornice hood above a frieze course. The fanlight has a moulded architrave with a decorative keystone, which also supports the cornice. The bay windows are topped with eaves cornices and blocking courses, with pilaster jambs at the edges of the bay faces from which rise moulded architraves with decorative keystones. Sturdy brackets appear below the cills. To the first floor are three evenly spaced sash windows with segmental arch heads and moulded, shouldered and heeled architraves with keystones.

The east facade features twinned windows to the left on the ground floor, similar to the first floor front windows but with pilaster surrounds, decorative keystones and brackets to cills. A set of French doors with a large fanlight occupies the left side; these doors have a similar surround to the twinned windows and represent a recent conversion of what was previously a window opening. A cill course runs across the ground floor. The first floor (above the frieze course) has twinned windows to the left and a single window to the right, matching the first floor front treatment with visible brackets below cills.

The west facade follows a similar arrangement to the east, but handed and without doors, featuring a single window at ground floor level. A short single-storey, hipped roof projection with a single window extends from the far right of this facade. The rear of this projection is blank and merges into a largely two-storey flat-roofed extension with modern windows and doors, which was added around the 1950s. The hipped roof projection to the rear is original to the building.

The house was probably built in the 1880s, possibly by W. Sibbald Johnson, who owned a linen bleach works at Kiltonga. Local tradition suggests it was also once the home of a member of the rose-growing Dickson family. The building is well preserved both externally and internally, though it does not meet the criteria required for heritage listing.