63-73 Royal Avenue, 7-13 Lower Garfield Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT1

Spencer House (65–73 Royal Avenue and 7–13 Lower Garfield Street, Belfast)

This four-storey commercial building, also known as Spencer House, was constructed in 1883 to designs by the architectural practice of Young & Mackenzie. It occupies a prominent corner position where Royal Avenue meets Lower Garfield Street, and was built as part of the wider Royal Avenue redevelopment of 1880–81, when the city surveyor J. C. Bretland created the long open boulevard now running from Donegall Square to York Street — a project that involved the demolition of virtually all earlier buildings on the street and the relocation of approximately 4,000 people.

The building is designed in the Baroque style, four storeys tall with an attic storey above. The roof is pitched and finished in natural slate. A conical-roofed corner turret with a weather vane marks the curved south corner of the building, and serves as a landmark looking north along Royal Avenue. Chimneys are brick with rendered coping. Rainwater goods are cast iron.

The external walls are of English garden wall bonded red brick. There is a parapet with dormers, and giant pilasters at the corners. Decorative detailing is rich throughout: a dentilled string course runs at eaves level, with moulded strings and architraves across the façades. Semi-circular rendered dormer heads feature decorated tympana. The dormer windows are flat-arched with exaggerated rendered keystones. The turret dormers have semi-circular arches with moulded pilasters and archivolts and exaggerated keystones, with oculi centred above them set in rendered surrounds.

Window openings vary by floor. The third-floor openings are shallow segmental arches with rendered architraves and exaggerated keystones. The second-floor openings are semi-circular arches with fluted pilasters, foliate capitals, moulded archivolts, exaggerated keystones, and sunrise tympana. The first-floor windows are flat-lintelled, full-storey height, and full width between fluted pilasters; the pilasters carry foliate capitals and zoomorphic decorated panels — these include an owl with prey under a crescent moon, an eagle under a smiling sun, a pike standing on its tail before a bulrush, a water snail and water lily, a pot-bellied heron, a parrot in a fruit tree, and similar motifs, described by the architectural historian Marcus Patton as "witty." The windows to the upper floors are metal-frame replacements; those to the first floor are timber replacements. The ground-floor fascia and shop fronts are modern replacements.

The west elevation is eight windows wide, arranged in a 3/2/3 rhythm, with three dormers; the curved corner of three windows faces south. The south elevation is eight windows wide with four dormers. The east elevation is plain brickwork with flat-arched windows, four bays wide. Although modern alterations have compromised the building to some degree, a substantial amount of historic fabric and decorative detailing survives.

Young & Mackenzie was formed in 1868 by Robert Young and John Mackenzie. By the beginning of the 20th century the practice had become the most successful architectural firm in Belfast and had received some of the most important commercial commissions in the city. In 1882, the year before Spencer House was completed, the firm had also designed the nearby 31–39 Royal Avenue.

The building was originally occupied by J. C. Mayrs & Co. Ltd., cabinet makers, upholsterers and general house furnishers, who used the ground floor for retail and the upper floors as offices and showrooms. At the time of the Belfast Revaluation of 1900, the total construction cost of the building was recorded as £8,384 19s. 6d., and the premises comprised two ground-floor shops, eight showrooms across the first and second floors, and six storerooms on the upper floors; the rateable value at that point was £875. J. C. Mayrs & Co. operated from the building for nearly fifty years, but was placed into voluntary liquidation on 6 August 1929, a casualty of the depression affecting the Irish textile industry during the interwar years. By the First General Revaluation of 1935, Spencer House had been taken over by Sinclair & Co., a drapers firm that also occupied a department store at 89–101 Royal Avenue, using Spencer House as additional retail and showroom space. The building's rateable value was assessed at £2,140 under that revaluation, rising to £4,184 by the end of the Second General Revaluation in 1972. The building was listed in 1989.

Spencer House stands on the north corner of the busy 65–73 Royal Avenue frontage and the pedestrianised Lower Garfield Street. It is one of several listed commercial buildings within the same block on the east side of Royal Avenue. The building continues to be used as commercial premises and, in keeping with its long association with the Irish textile trade, the main ground-floor unit has been occupied by merchants of Irish linen.