'The Regency Hotel and Metro Brasserie', 13 Lower Crescent, Belfast, Co Antrim, BT7 1NR

The Regency Hotel and Metro Brasserie, 13 Lower Crescent, is a large, much-altered, double-fronted four-storey town house in the French Mannerist style, built in 1874–75 to designs by architect William Hastings. It stands on the corner of Lower Crescent and Botanic Avenue and is finished with a stucco façade featuring prominent window mouldings and quoins. The building was originally constructed as three storeys with an attic, but around 1965 the attic level was heightened in brick, giving it its present flat roof and distinctly blocky appearance. To the rear there is a large two-and-a-half-storey hipped-roof return, which evidence suggests originally housed a dancing academy. The building has been converted to a hotel and sits within a conservation area.

The front elevation faces roughly south and is almost symmetrical. At the centre of the ground floor is the main entrance: a panelled and glazed double door with a segmental arched fanlight, the whole set within a moulded surround with a decorative keystone. The doorway is flanked by prominent pilasters on tall bases, topped with curved brackets that support a cornice-like hood with a blocking course above. These pilasters are themselves flanked by broad quoin-like pilasters that rise through the full height of the original portion of the façade — that is, through the first and second floors. Projecting period-style lanterns have been attached to these pilasters at ground floor level. Identical quoins frame both the front and the east elevation. To the left of the entrance are two segmental-headed sash windows with Georgian-like panes (9/9 configuration) and lugged and heeled moulded surrounds with keystones; two identical windows sit to the right. All four ground floor windows rest on a plain cill course and each has a recently added chevaux de frise and a similarly recent awning above.

At first floor level there are five windows, all fitted with recent top-hung frames made to resemble sashes, each with a moulded surround, and all set on a cill course. The surrounds to the first, second, fourth and fifth windows are lugged, with a small decorative arched moulding above and brackets below the cill course. The central window differs, having a heeled surround with a segmental hood supported on curved brackets and decorative mouldings to the tympanum. At second floor level there are five shorter windows with the same style of frames. All have lugged and heeled surrounds with small decorative arched panels above and are set on a cill course; the centre window has a segmental arched head with keystone, while the remainder are flat-arched. At third floor level — the circa-1965 addition — there are three unevenly spaced windows, smaller than those below, with modern frames. These sit on what was originally the cornice-like eaves course, which retains dentillations beneath it. Moulded string courses run between the ground and first floors, and again between the first and second floors. The front façade is finished in plain painted render, except at third floor level where it is painted brick.

The east elevation consists of the main four-storey block to the left and the long two-and-a-half (or two-and-a-quarter) storey hipped-roof return to the centre and right. At ground floor level of the four-storey section there is a pair of windows matching those to the right and left on the ground floor front. At second floor level, directly above the ground floor windows, is a further pair of windows matching those to the right and left on the first floor front; to the right of the second floor is a window matching the second floor windows on the front. The third floor of this section is blank, though at its centre the lower portion of a formerly free-standing chimney stack remains visible — following the heightening of the attic storey, only the uppermost third of the chimney stacks to east and west remain free-standing. On the east face of the return there are four evenly spaced segmental-arched windows at ground floor level; these are relatively short compared to other ground floor windows, have recent frames and moulded surrounds, and each has a chevaux de frise. To the far right is a large flat-arched opening of garage-like proportions. At first floor level — which sits lower than the first floor of the main building — there are two widely spaced windows with lugged and heeled surrounds, filled with recent frames and ventilators, set on a cill course. Between these windows is a projecting chimney breast bearing a moulded shield motif set within a moulded quatrefoil; the chimney stack itself has been removed. At second floor level there are two wide but squat windows with recent casement frames with Georgian-like panes. The far right of the first and second floor levels of this elevation is recessed and appears to be a later addition. The entire east elevation is finished in the same manner as the front, though the return has no quoins. The short north face of the return is blank. The west face of the return is almost entirely covered by a relatively recent two-storey flat-roofed extension, with only a gabled portion to the left remaining visible, containing a fire escape door.

The rear, north-facing façade of the main building is visible only at third floor level, where there is a fire escape door to the right of centre, a window to the far left, and one to the far right, both with recent frames. This level is finished in the same painted brick as the third floor of the east and south elevations. The main block is flat-roofed with a broad, pot-less chimney stack to each of the east and west ends. At the centre of this roof there is a small single-storey flat-roofed projection, possibly a water tank.

The building was originally known as Rivoli House and was built for Frederick Brouneau, a dancing master who ran a dancing academy on the premises, most likely in the rear return. It has been speculated that Brouneau's Gallic-sounding name may account for the French Mannerist character of the façade. By the late 1880s or 1890s the property had been renamed Dreenagh House, probably by Dr John Byers, who succeeded Brouneau as resident. The Byers family remained there until the 1930s, when the building was acquired by an Arthur Hamilton, who re-established part of it as a school of dancing. By 1951 it had three occupants, one of whom appears to have run a furniture business, presumably in the return. In the later 1950s the building was converted to a hotel — The Regency — and at around that time, or shortly afterwards at approximately 1960, the attic was heightened to form a fourth storey, with the return extended at roughly the same period. In the 1980s the neighbouring property, No. 12 Lower Crescent, was incorporated into the hotel, with a restaurant extending across the ground floor of that building and into the hotel itself. In the late 1990s this restaurant was converted to a public bar.

The building sits within the wider context of the Upper and Lower Crescent area, which developed from the mid-19th century following the selling off of much of Lord Donegall's Belfast estate. The lands to the south of the town along the Malone Ridge were particularly attractive to developers and saw the construction of many fine late Georgian-style terraces from the mid-1830s onwards, a trend accelerated by the establishment of Queen's College in the area in the later 1840s. These grand terraces were occupied by Belfast's professional and business classes, who vacated their older residences in the town centre, which were gradually converted to shops and offices. Upper Crescent was perhaps the grandest of these terrace developments: an elegantly curving row of three-storey dwellings in a late Regency style, built in 1846 by timber and shipping merchant Robert Corry. Its authorship is uncertain, though Dr Paul Larmour has suggested the hand of Charles Lanyon may have been involved. Corry himself undertook the building work and took up residence at the east end; for the first few years the row was known as Corry's Crescent. Immediately to the south, where a church and small park now stand, Corry held a large lawn as a garden. Shortly after it was laid out he had it ploughed up and used for growing vegetables to relieve local workers suffering during the Great Famine. To the north ran an old watercourse flowing into a reservoir east of the Dublin Road known as the Basin; to the east were smaller gardens belonging to other occupants of the Crescent; and to the east and north-east ran Albion Lane, a narrow semi-rural laneway stretching from the north end of Bradbury Place to the east end of the present University Terrace.

In 1852 Corry built another terrace to the north of his garden, just south of the old watercourse. This new development — the erroneously named Lower Crescent — was much in the same style as that to the south and was occupied by a similar mix of professionals and businessmen, though by as early as 1860 the ground floors of some properties were in use as offices. In the later 1860s a railway line was cut immediately to the north of Lower Crescent, along the line of the old watercourse. In 1873 a large sandstone building — originally the Ladies Collegiate, later Victoria College — was added to the west end of the terrace. Two houses were added to the east end by the close of the decade, the most easterly of which was Rivoli House, the present building. Upper Crescent also saw further building in the 1860s and 1870s, including two large properties designed by William Hastings erected to the west end in 1869, one of which — Crescent House, now the Bank of Ireland — also fronted onto University Road. In 1878–79 two further houses were inserted on the ground between those of 1869. Between 1885 and 1887 a large Presbyterian church — the present Crescent Church — was erected to designs by Glasgow architect John Bennie Wilson on the west side of Corry's former garden, and in 1898 a two-storey terrace, the present Crescent Gardens, was built on the site of smaller garden plots at the east end.

During the first half of the 20th century most properties in Upper and Lower Crescent and in Crescent Gardens remained private dwellings, but by 1960 many had passed into business use or been divided into flats. By the beginning of the 21st century none remained as private residences. In the mid-1990s three of the 1860s to 1870s houses at the west end of Upper Crescent were demolished and replaced with a modern office block. In 2000 the railway cutting to the south of Lower Crescent was built over in preparation for a new development.