346 Antrim Road, Belfast, Co. Antrim, BT15 5AE

346 Antrim Road is a mid-terrace, three-bay, two-storey with attic, red brick former house built around 1877 to designs by the Belfast architectural partnership Young and Mackenzie. It is now subdivided into five apartments. The building forms part of a terrace of four similar houses — originally known collectively as Clonsilla — with a further two terraced dwellings of similar height and width abutting the northern end of the row, all sitting on the west side of Antrim Road. The plan is T-shaped, with an enclosed front garden to the east and a rear yard to the west.

The roof is pitched with artificial slates and synthetic ridge tiles, lead valleys, and uPVC rainwater goods fixed to a timber box fascia with decorative timber brackets. The chimneys have been removed. The walls are laid in Flemish bond red brick with cement pointing, moulded red brick string courses, and painted flush sandstone ashlar dressings. The plinth is rock-faced uncoursed squared sandstone with chamfered ashlar sandstone trim. Window openings are square-headed, fitted with uPVC windows, and have painted sandstone ashlar cills and flush lintels, the lintels carrying bowtel mouldings.

The east front elevation of three bays is the most characterful face of the building. To the right, a canted full-height bay window rises to attic level, where it becomes a rectangular half-timbered gabled oriel window fitted with a uPVC window. Projecting eaves above this bay are supported by decorative moulded and curved timber brackets, with timber sheeting to the underside and a timber bargeboard. To the left bay, a wall-head dormer window with a hipped roof contains paired square-headed window openings. The central entrance is shouldered, with a painted sandstone ashlar lintel bearing foliate and floral carvings. The door itself is a replacement timber panelled door with a plain fanlight, opening onto three replacement concrete steps above an original flagstone-paved footpath.

The south side elevation is abutted by the adjoining No. 344. The west rear elevation has two casement windows and is covered in dry-dash render, and also has a two-storey red brick return built around 1990 with uPVC windows. The north side elevation is abutted by No. 348.

The building sits back from Antrim Road behind a gravel front garden enclosed by a replacement concrete plinth wall and steel railing, with a steel pedestrian gate hung on replacement red brick pillars. To the rear, a replacement tall red brick wall encloses the yard, which is served by a bitmac shared alleyway opening onto Hopefield Avenue.

The house was built for Andrew Wright, a local pawnbroker and clerk at the Belfast Loan Office on Ann Street, who at the time resided at No. 3 Cranston Place. It was designed by Young and Mackenzie, a practice formed around 1867 between Robert Young and John Mackenzie, described in the Dictionary of Irish Architects as the leading architects for the Presbyterian Church in the north-east, who also received some of Belfast's most important commercial commissions and designed a large number of Victorian terraces across the city.

The terrace was built on the grounds of Hopefield House, a two-storey, six-bay mansion formerly occupied by the Sinclair family in the townland of Skegoneill, which by the mid-19th century had become one of the most affluent areas of Belfast. The Antrim Road itself had been laid out in 1830, and the land to the north of the Belfast Waterworks remained largely rural until the area was built over during the 1870s. The annual rateable value of No. 346 was set at £44 in 1877. The first recorded occupant was a Mrs Norton; by around 1890 the Reverend James Maconaghie of Fortwilliam Park Presbyterian Church was in residence. By the 1911 census the occupant was James Hamilton, described as a fancy box manufacturer, and the building was recorded as a first-class dwelling of twelve rooms with a wash house and coal house as its sole outbuildings. By the 1930s ownership of Nos. 344–350 had passed to a Francis Curley, who briefly lived at No. 346 until 1938, when a Henry McFadden took occupation. By the 1950s the property was in the ownership of an H. Crawford and was partially used as a private medical surgery; by the end of that revaluation period its rateable value had risen to £63.

The building was listed in 1987. Around 1990 it was extensively refurbished and converted into five self-contained apartments, at which time the replacement two-storey red brick return was constructed and the original outhouses were demolished. The uPVC windows, dry-dash render to the rear, new return, and fibre cement roof slates introduced at that time are considered to detract from the character of the building. Nonetheless, the retained sandstone dressings, Tudoresque half-timbered gable, and original brickwork continue to define the character of the front elevation, and the building retains strong group value as one of a coherent and distinctive row of six on the Antrim Road.