1 Upper Knockbreda Road, Belfast, County Antrim, BT6 9QH

This is a well-preserved, detached Edwardian house of three bays and two storeys with an attic, built around 1910 to the designs of Belfast architect Thomas Houston, who originally built it as his own home. It sits north of the Upper Knockbreda Road carriageway, south of Belfast city centre, on a mature site in the townland of Cregagh Lisnasharragh.

The house is rectangular in plan with corner windows and gables, and the roofs are hipped and gabled, covered in red tiles. The walls are finished in painted roughcast render. Chimneys are roughcast rendered with decorative terracotta pots. The eaves overhang to expose the rafter ends, and half-round cast-iron rainwater goods run along them. Windows throughout are original timber-framed casements unless otherwise noted. There are dormer windows to the southwest and northwest.

The principal elevation faces southwest and features a centrally recessed porch reached by three red-brick steps, with a dormer above. The original timber-sheeted-and-glazed door sits to the left of the porch, with a quarter-pane window to its right and a larger double-paned window to the far right; both inner cheeks of the porch also have windows. The left bay of the principal elevation is gabled and chamfered at ground-floor level, with a corner window at the left, a triple-paned window at ground floor and a double-paned window at first floor. The right bay is blank.

The northwest elevation has a triple-paned window at ground-floor left and a double-paned casement that breaks the eaves line at first floor, along with two small glazed windows left of centre. The northeast rear elevation has a hipped dormer to the centre of the roof containing a double-paned window. At first floor there is a double-paned window to the right of centre, a smaller quarter-pane window, and a diminutive window to the left of centre. A double-paned window sits at ground floor.

The southeast gable has a projecting bay at ground floor, partially timber-clad with a sloping tiled roof and cheeks to either side. This bay contains, from left to right, a timber-sheeted latch door, a plate-glass window, and a four-panelled latch door. The gable itself has two double-paned windows at first floor and a quarter-pane window at attic level. A roughcast rendered toilet block abuts the projecting bay to the right.

A single-storey extension occupies the northeast corner of the building, also designed by Houston, dating from the 1930s. It has a leaded casement corner window to its northwest elevation. Its southeast elevation is abutted by a flat-roofed extension containing a modern timber door flanked by a leaded casement window and a narrower window to the right. The northeast elevation of the extension has a single window. The main northeast elevation is abutted at its right by this single-storey extension.

The interior is well preserved and retains detailing characteristic of the Edwardian period. Historical valuation records from 1933 describe the accommodation as comprising a hall, library, drawing room, dining room, kitchen, scullery, pantry, three bedrooms, a maid's room, a bathroom and a WC. By the time of a 1937 sale, the dining room and cloakroom were panelled, the kitchen had a triplex grate (probably coal-fired with a back boiler), and the house had electric light and gas for cooking, though water was still drawn by pump from the adjacent stream.

The house is accessed from Rochester Road to the northeast through wrought-iron gates. The boundary to the southeast is defined by a modern timber fence with red-brick piers capped in masonry and supporting timber-sheeted gates. Although the setting has changed considerably since the house was built, the garden to the north retains a mature character.

The house was first recorded on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map of 1920–21 under the name 'The Burn', a reference to a small river — a tributary of the Loop River — that ran beside the property, supplied its water, and fed a small ornamental pond and waterfall. At the time of construction, this part of Castlereagh was largely rural, lying beyond the outer edges of suburban Belfast and characterised by farmhouses and mansions in substantial grounds. The land was leased from the Marquess of Downshire, and the buildings were valued in 1914 at £28 10s, with £1 for the surrounding land. During the First World War, allotments known as the 'Cregagh Garden Plots' were established nearby.

Thomas Houston (1873–1938) was born in Coleraine and trained in the Belfast offices of Young and Mackenzie before studying architecture in England. He established his own practice in Belfast in 1901 and became the first tenant of 'Kingscourt' at 17 Wellington Place, offices he occupied for the rest of his life. Although his output included hospitals, churches and commercial buildings, he was primarily a domestic architect, responsible for many of the domestic revival houses in the Malone area of Belfast. Houston added a motor house to the plot in 1924, raising the valuation to £40. He moved out by 1922 and by 1931 was living in Harberton Avenue, in a house also likely to have been his own design. Subsequent occupiers of 'The Burn' included John James Cox (1922), James Norman Inglis (1923), Herbert Cecil Pearson (1929), Albert Arthur Constable (1931), Robert Liddell (1934) and David Rutherford McKinney (1936). By 1938 the house had been renamed 'Merok Burn'. David Rutherford McKinney, a commission agent, died in December 1937 and the house was sold in 1939 to Dr J A Corkey for £1,350; he remained resident there until at least the 1970s. The house stood in approximately 2 acres of land at the time of the sale. The adjacent A55 carriageway was constructed in 1958 on land that had previously formed part of the property's setting, significantly altering the character of the immediate surroundings, which are now characterised by mid-20th-century semi-detached housing to the south.