Balloo House, Balloo Road, Bangor, Co Down

Balloo House was a two-story house with a basement and attic, situated on a corner plot with associated coachyard buildings and boundary walls. The house fronted south and featured a hipped slate roof, rendered chimneys, and rendered walls on a stone base, previously painted. The front elevation had five first-floor and four ground-floor double-height windows, all with Georgian panes. A fine central doorway was distinguished by an elliptical arch, a three-stone recessed surround with a panelled intrados, a decorative fanlight above a stone cornice and frieze transom, broken forward on each side with Doric pilasters and columns framing plain sidelights and a central glazed and panelled door. Paterae adorned the frieze above the pilasters, columns, and door, and a moulded platt step led to the doorway, with wrought iron lattice apron screens to the right-hand ground-floor windows. The coach house, set back at the northeast corner of the house, also had a hipped slate roof, a rendered chimney, and cast iron walls, featuring an elliptical arch coachway with a sheeted door granting access to the coachyard. Buildings enclosing the coachyard had slated and corrugated asbestos roofs, whinstone rubble walls and various openings, along with date stones. Date stones on the east gable of the house indicated "1644," while those on the coachyard buildings read "W.S.N 1819," "W.S.N. 1823," "R.S.N. 1855," "R.S.N. 1856," and "R.S.N. 1857," identifying members of the Nicholson family. The buildings were substantially shown on an Ordnance Survey map of 1833. The house was reported to be in poor condition, and the coachyard buildings were somewhat ruinous during the 1972 survey. The building has since been demolished and the site cleared; it now accommodates a park and wind turbine.