82 Coast Road, Cushendall, Co. Antrim, BT44 0SR

82 Coast Road, Cushendall, is a two-bay, two-storey semi-detached rendered house built around 1885, located in the townland of Bellisk (also recorded as Waterford) on the east side of Coast Road, also known as Glenariffe Road, which runs between Cushendall and Waterfoot. The architect is not known. The house was constructed as one of four dwellings within a single row — comprising what are now Nos. 80, 82 and 84 Coast Road — to serve as mess quarters for officers of the local coastguard station, which was situated at No. 70 Coast Road to the north-east. No. 82 forms a unified pair with the adjoining No. 80 Coast Road, and the two buildings share group value with one another and with the coastguard station.

The building is rectangular on plan, faces west, and sits slightly back and at a lower level than the road. The roof is a pitched natural slate hipped roof with black clay ridge tiles, overhanging eaves with exposed rafter tails, and plastic guttering discharging to plastic downpipes. A rendered profiled chimney stack with octagonal clay pots rises through the roofline. The walling is rough-cast render throughout. Window openings are segmental-headed with painted splayed masonry sills. The replacement sliding timber sash windows have slender ogee horns and six-over-six lights. Walls and window frames are painted white, while the base plinth, window and door surrounds, rainwater goods and rafter ends are all painted black in deliberate contrast, giving the pair a distinctive maritime character.

The two-bay west front elevation features an entrance porch with a hipped natural slate roof, multi-pane timber casement windows, and a glazed timber door. The door opens onto a concrete step and a front yard shared with the adjoining house. The north side abuts No. 80. The blind south elevation of the main house has a central chimney stack rising through the eaves.

The rear east elevation has a single window opening at each level to the left, and a further, smaller window opening to the right retaining an original four-pane timber casement window. At first-floor level, two segmental-arched window openings are visible: one with a replacement sliding timber sash window with six-over-six lights, and one to the left retaining an original four-pane timber casement window. A single-storey flat-roofed extension has been added to the rear, constructed in white-painted rough-cast render with uPVC casement windows in black-painted render surrounds. Access to the dwelling is via two concrete steps at a re-entrant corner. To the far right of the flat-roofed extension are a diagonally sheeted painted timber door and top-hung casement windows. This section is abutted by a lean-to with a corrugated asbestos sheet roof, the same walling and window treatment, a stainless steel boiler flue, and a vertically sheeted timber door.

The shared front area is a concrete hardstanding enclosed by a low rough-cast rendered wall with a concrete coping and replacement steel gates hung on square pillars.

The coastguard station at No. 70 Coast Road was in existence prior to 1832 and originally housed all coastguard officers. The row at Nos. 80–84 was constructed around 1885 — confirmed by the Annual Revisions — as dedicated mess quarters leased by the Admiralty, while the Chief Officer's quarters remained at No. 70. The row was originally divided into four single-bay, two-storey dwellings, each valued at £6 at the turn of the 20th century. The 1911 Census of Ireland records three of the four dwellings as inhabited, occupied respectively by George Whayman (Petty Officer), Frank Ernest Richards (loading boatman), and John Caine (Royal Navy Coast Guard). Each was described as a second-class dwelling of four rooms, with a fowl house, turf house and shed to the rear. The coastguard station was charged with protecting shipping and passenger steamers along the Antrim coast. Wilson's Shipwrecks of the Ulster Coast records several wrecks along the rocks between Cushendall and Red Bay in the early 19th century, including the transatlantic barque New Zealand (1841), the Mediterranean-bound brig Scotia (1842), and the Helen (1849), a ferry operating between Glenarm and Glasgow.

By the 1930s the properties appear to have passed out of coastguard use and were leased to private tenants by Dixon Estates Ltd. The rateable value of No. 82 was raised to £13 under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57). Occupants changed frequently over the following decades until around 1965, when the house was purchased outright by a Mr. James O'Neill, who also occupied the adjoining No. 80. By the end of the Second General Revaluation (1956–72), the total rateable value stood at £18. The 1972 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide to the Glens of Antrim described Nos. 80–84 Coast Road as "a semi-detached pair, under a single hipped roof, of whitewashed roughcast with black-painted quoins and long-and-short window surrounds; the windows segmental-headed; not built to the normal Board of Works coastguard-house pattern."

The building retains its essential external form and its simple, almost symmetrical composition — hipped slate roofs, profiled chimneys, segmental-arched windows and the characteristic two-tone painted finish — allowing the pair to read as a well-proportioned, unified group. Despite the introduction of uPVC windows and rear extensions, the building's external appearance as a maritime structure, set down from the main road behind matching rendered boundary walls and overlooking the sea to the east, remains distinctive within the coastal setting.