1 Stormont Cottages, Stormont Estate, Upper Newtownards Road, Belfast, County Antrim, BT4 3XX

1 Stormont Cottages, Stormont Estate, Belfast

This is a semi-detached two-bay two-storey rendered house, built around 1936, forming one half of a pair of villas constructed as residences for the superintendents of the Stormont Estate. L-shaped on plan and facing south, the house stands on the south side of a short tarmac avenue to the south of Massey Avenue within the Stormont Estate. It was built alongside its neighbour, No. 2 Stormont Cottages, and is designed in a restrained Arts and Crafts style. The architect is not known with certainty, though the building is possibly the work of Ernest L. Woods (1877–1952), a Bangor-based architect and engineer who worked predominantly on commercial and domestic contracts in the 1930s and who is recorded as having designed at least four houses within the Stormont Estate around 1931. The Northern Ireland First Survey Record of 1994 attributes the villas to architects attached to the Northern Ireland Ministry of Finance. The house retains most of its original fabric internally and externally, and forms an important part of the wider group of structures within the Stormont Estate, which includes Parliament Buildings and the entrance lodges.

Exterior

The roof is half-hipped and covered in natural slate with gauged slates, roll-moulded lead ridges, and two tall profiled red brick chimneystacks, the eastern one shared with the adjoining house. Moulded cast-iron guttering is carried on deeply overhanging timber-sheeted eaves with exposed rafter feet, with cast-iron downpipes. The walls are finished in painted rough-cast render, with painted brick below the ground floor sill course. Window openings are square-headed with painted shaped brick courses and fitted with original steel casement windows.

The south-facing garden front elevation is three windows wide and features a three-sided canted bay window to the left with a concrete coping to its parapet. The west side elevation contains the original entrance porch, which has a steep slate roof and a square-headed door opening on its north side fitted with an original timber panelled door glazed to the upper six panels. The rear elevation is three windows wide with a flat-roofed single-storey extension to the left. The east side elevation is abutted by the adjoining No. 2 Stormont Cottages.

Setting

The house is accessed via a short tarmac avenue just south of the Massey Avenue gate lodge. It has a small enclosed rear yard, with painted rough-cast rendered boundary walling finished with red brick coping, extending from the gable and incorporating an arched opening fitted with a painted timber gate. Tall painted rough-cast rendered gate piers with red brick cappings and painted timber gates, together with hedging, front onto the avenue. A large garden lies to the south elevation.

Historical Background

The site has a layered history within the Stormont Estate. Before the construction of Parliament Buildings between 1928 and 1932 and the laying out of Massey Avenue, the lane to the north side of the villas served as the original western entrance to the estate of Stormont Castle. A gate lodge known as Killeen Lodge stood on the site of the current lavatory block to the north-west of the villas. Following the purchase of the Stormont Estate in 1921, Killeen Lodge was used as a private dwelling until the completion of Parliament Buildings and the ceremonial opening of the estate on 16th November 1932 by the Prince of Wales, after which it was occupied by Nathaniel Cank, the newly appointed estate superintendent. Cank remained at Killeen Lodge until around 1936, when Stormont Villas were built. Killeen Lodge was subsequently demolished and replaced with the current lavatory block.

No. 1 Stormont Cottages was first recorded in the Belfast Street Directory of 1936 and was depicted in its current layout on the 1938 edition of the Ordnance Survey County Series map. Its first recorded occupant was John Charles Conway, employed as an estate superintendent, who lived there until his death in 1958, after which the house passed to Halt Waring, a prominent civil servant. The Second General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1956–72) set the total rateable value of the property, exempt from taxation, at £27, and recorded it as owned by the Northern Ireland Ministry of Finance. Belfast Street Directories record that the house was occupied by a Mr. William Vaughan between the 1970s and 1980s.

Parliament Buildings itself was designed by Arnold Thornely (1870–1953), who was also responsible for the estate's gateways, gate lodges, and the former Provincial Bank on Massey Avenue. It is uncertain whether Thornely was involved in the design of Stormont Villas, as the dwellings were constructed four years after the opening of the estate. The 1994 First Survey Record described the pair as: "A pair of two-storey houses or cottages with half-hipped roofs, slated, and roughcast walls with some rustic brick dressings such as yard wall copings, string course, window sills and canted bay windows. Small paned casements. Nicely designed in a kind of Arts and Crafts idiom, definitely domestic in feel."

The listing covers the house, gate, piers, and walling.