The Alexander Arms Hotel, 34 Main Street, Limavady, Co Londonderry, BT49 OEU

The Alexander Arms Hotel is an early Georgian building located at 34 Main Street, Limavady, facing south-east onto the street. Although heavily altered by subsequent renovations, it retains some details of historical character including the entrance door, stained glass vestibule, and early lugged architraves around the entrance hall doors. However, too much historic detail and character has been lost for listing to be justified.

The building is three storeys high and four windows wide, with smooth rendered and painted exterior walls. It has a double-pitch slate roof with a flat roof bridging the internal valley, cast iron guttering and downpipe. The windows are PVC units with central transoms set in raised architraves, with painted stone cills and modern decorative metal upstands. The principal entrance features a door at the top of three tiled steps, flanked by Tuscan columns supporting a semi-circular pediment above. The centre of the pediment contains a much smaller undecorated semi-circular window looking into the lobby beyond. At ground floor level, one window is positioned to the north-east of the entrance, with two windows to the south-west.

The building sits between two neighbours of similar width and height. To the north-east, an arch through the ground floor of number 36 reveals that building to be brick-built upon a basalt coursing rising to 1.2 metres from ground level. Number 32, to the south-west, is also rendered and of identical dimensions. The hotel may originally have been similarly constructed but is now entirely rendered. A portion of the north-east gable projects to the rear one metre beyond number 36, unrendered above ground level, with bricked-up windows and a chimney on the apex of the rear roof pitch. A flat-roofed kitchen extension projects for two levels and is rendered. The rear elevation is also rendered with little ordered fenestration.

Behind the hotel stands an interesting stable block running continuously behind numbers 32, 34, 36 and 38 Main Street. Built of brick and one storey and a half in height, it presents an arch flanked by a door and circular windows to the courtyard of number 34, with a further three circular windows above and a door that projects up through the eaves forming a dormer.

The building is indicated on the 1831 Ordnance Survey Map. The stable block is shown on the 1848 map. The building is first labelled as a hotel on the 1907 map. The lugged architraves, typically associated with early buildings, suggest a date of construction in the 1730s to 1750s, contemporaneous with Streeve House, which displays similar architraves. A flat roof was inserted between the roof pitches approximately sixteen years ago (1981) and was reported by the then-owner to be in need of replacement. The current owner acquired the hotel ten years prior to the survey. Exterior renovations were carried out in 1992. Historic Buildings photographic records from 1973 show the brick facade as exposed; this was rendered shortly afterwards. The building is not officially registered as a hotel, as it does not meet the required minimum number of bedrooms, and is instead registered as bed and breakfast accommodation. The Art Nouveau decoration and stained glass are consistent with conversion to hotel use at the end of the nineteenth century.