49 Sunnyside Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT7 3EX

49 Sunnyside Street is a terraced two-storey redbrick house with attic dormer, built around 1870. It forms part of a terrace of six similar houses on the north side of Sunnyside Street in Belfast. The house is L-shaped on plan and faced south.

The roof is pitched with artificial slate and black clay ridge tiles. A replacement brick chimneystack to the west has terracotta pots, and rooflights have been inserted. The wall-head dormer is shared with the adjoining house No. 47, featuring timber bargeboard, redbrick walling, and a diminutive square-headed window opening. Plastic guttering runs along a painted stone eaves course, beneath which sits a polychromatic brick frieze. The main walls are redbrick laid in Flemish bond with a painted sandstone plinth course.

The front elevation is two windows wide. Window openings are square-headed with painted masonry lintels, painted masonry sills, and uPVC windows. A decorative painted masonry doorcase stands to the right, abutting that of the adjoining house. The doorcase comprises a square-headed door opening with a replacement hardwood panelled door and rectangular overlight, flanked by plain pilasters on plinth blocks and oversized foliate console brackets—the eastern bracket shared with the adjoining house—supporting a shared lintel cornice and decorative segmental stone panel above. The front door opens onto a cobblelock garden enclosed by replacement steel railings on a brick wall.

The west side elevation is abutted by adjoining house No. 51. The rear elevation adjoins a shared two-storey return. The rear walls are redbrick laid in English garden wall bond with uPVC windows and masonry sills. A small enclosed rear yard with redbrick screen wall opens into the rear garden. The east side elevation is abutted by adjoining house No. 47.

The terrace was built as a development by Thomas Fitzpatrick on land he had purchased. Fitzpatrick was a sculptor of considerable repute, responsible for fine stone carving on Belfast buildings including the Harbour Office and the Merchant Hotel. He began as a sculptor in partnership with his brother William in the 1850s, became a general building contractor in the 1860s, and remained active until the 1890s or later.

When the area west of the Ormeau Road was largely open in the late nineteenth century, the terrace was one of the first developments along the newly laid out Sunnyside Street. Until the early twentieth century, few houses had been built along the road. The terrace first appears in valuation records as unfinished houses and yards in 1869 and was completed and valued in 1870 at £15 each. According to surviving papers of the Fitzpatrick Brothers, the houses were sold in pairs: numbers 43 and 45 to Thomas Neill, who occupied one and let the other; numbers 51 and 53 to Samuel McCormick, who also occupied one while letting the other. The ownership of the middle pair is less certain, passing through several landlords in quick succession but both let out.

The occupants were generally comfortable, employed as commercial travellers, clerks, and shopkeepers—rarely able to afford a servant but typically involved in supervisory and clerical rather than manual work.

The occupiers of number 49 included Joseph Chapman in 1870, Hugh Small, schoolmaster (1877), Joseph McChesney, jeweller (1884), John H Howell, master of the Royal Academical Institution (1887), and Anne M McKibbin (1892). Anne McKibbin was listed in the 1901 census as a 70-year-old spinster living with her domestic servant. Later occupiers were J Maxwell, sanitary inspector (1904), J Arnold, commercial traveller (1905), James Stronge, a retired engineman from County Monaghan (1911 census, when the household included his wife, three children, a son-in-law, and four grandchildren), James Matthews (1913), Miss J Stronge (1933), Mrs Melville (1935), Thomas Kerr (1939), R Pedlow (1953), and J Miskelly, bricklayer (1955). The house continues in use as a domestic dwelling.

The house has been extensively refurbished with the loss of much original fabric. Despite this, it retains its overall composition and decorative detailing and makes a marked contribution to the late nineteenth-century character of the street. However, it is not of sufficient architectural or historical interest to be considered for individual or group listing.