119 Main Street, Bushmills, Co. Antrim, BT57 8QB

119 Main Street, Bushmills, is a two-storey, three-bay painted rendered mid-terrace building with a ground floor shopfront, situated on the west side of Main Street within the Bushmills Conservation Area, due south of Market Square. It was originally constructed between approximately 1834 and 1857 as two smaller separate houses, by an unknown architect, and has been in continuous commercial use. The building was delisted on 2 June 2017.

The building has a rectangular plan with a duo-pitched natural slate roof finished with black clay ridge tiles and projecting eaves course; there are no chimney stacks. Rainwater goods are uPVC throughout, discharging via uPVC downpipes. The front (north-east facing) elevation is finished in lined and ruled painted render, set on a rendered plinth. The rear and south-east gable are roughcast. The south-east gable is blank and unpainted, finished in scratch-coat plaster, with toothed quoins remaining as evidence of an adjoining building that has since been demolished.

At first floor level, the front elevation has three timber sliding sash windows, each with one-over-one lights, their heads set just below the eaves. At ground floor level, the original character of the two former separate houses has been substantially lost through modification: the shopfront now consists of two large picture windows, with an entrance door to the right and a further door giving access to a right-of-way passage, both reached directly from the paved footpath on Main Street. The ground floor arrangement is not aligned with the three bays above. Doors, windows, rainwater goods, and the base plinth are all painted in a contrasting colour.

To the rear (south-west), the elevation extends as a cat-slide roof descending from the two-storey main building across almost its full width, leaving only a narrow slice of yard equal in width to the vertically sheeted timber back door serving the right-of-way passage. Above this door, the wall is smooth rendered and unpainted, and a small blocked window is tucked below eaves height at first floor level. This cat-slide roof is abutted by a single-storey return, which is in turn adjoined by a further gabled extension set at ninety degrees to the main building. This latter extension has a painted timber eaves board and a sheeted metal door offset to the left, accessed by galvanised metal steps and a balustrade supporting a timber-framed monopitched canopy with corrugated polycarbonate roofing. The rear extensions are finished in unpainted roughcast render on a smooth rendered base, with pitched natural slate roofs, clipped eaves, and uPVC rainwater goods throughout. The north-west side of the building adjoins the neighbouring property at No. 117 Main Street.

Internally, there is very little evidence of historic detailing. The entire ground floor, including the staircase, is modern. Whilst the rear extensions are considered subservient and sensitively integrated, they obscure much of the original building fabric.

The site sits in the townland of Magheraboy or Bushmills, on a street aligned parallel to the Bush River, set within a terraced row of similarly scaled buildings. To the left (south) the building formerly adjoined Nos. 121–123 Main Street, now demolished; to the right (north) it adjoins No. 117 Main Street.

Historically, a building was recorded on the site in the Townland Valuation Town Plan of approximately 1834, though the Townland Valuations of 1835 noted it was already in an old and dilapidated condition at that time. The current building was in existence by 1857, when it first appeared on the second edition Ordnance Survey map, and was recorded in Griffith's Valuation of 1859 as two separate houses, each with a rateable value of £2, leased by William McNeill to tenants William Patterson (northernmost dwelling) and Archibald Kane (the adjoining house). Bushmills itself was extensively rebuilt from the 1820s by the MacNaghten family of Bushmills House, who had acquired the estate in 1787.

Ownership of the site passed to James McCallum, a local shopkeeper residing at Nos. 109–113 Main Street, around 1874. Tenants changed frequently over the following decades. By the turn of the 20th century both properties had been acquired by William Douthart, a local shoemaker. The 1901 Census of Ireland recorded only the southernmost building as occupied, describing it as a second-class dwelling of six rooms. The Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1902 depicted the property in its current form as a single building, though the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) once again recorded it as two separate premises, each with a shopfront at ground level, with a combined rateable value of £14 and 10 shillings. By the end of the Second General Revaluation (1956–72), the combined rateable value had risen to £31 and 10 shillings. In the 1970s the building was leased by Hugh Lecky, a prominent local landowner, to Alexander McKinney (northernmost shop and dwelling) and George McMullan (southern building). The two formerly separate houses had been merged into a single three-bay building by at least 1980, when No. 119 was first listed as a single property.

The 1972 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society Guide for North Antrim described Main Street, Bushmills generally as: "A well-scaled street. Many good doorways and shopfronts remain, although there is the usual profusion of signs. While no building apart from the former Courthouse is worthy of individual mention, the unity of the street frontages must be maintained."

The Bushmills Conservation Area was designated in 1992 to preserve the built heritage of the village, which possesses the highest number of listed buildings in the north-east of Northern Ireland. Single-storey extensions were added to the rear of the property around 2005. The cumulative effect of modifications to the ground floor, the loss of the individual character of the two original house elevations, the almost complete absence of historic internal detailing, and the extent to which the rear extensions obscure the original building fabric were considered sufficient to render the building of insufficient architectural or historic interest to remain on the statutory list, and it was deslisted on 2 June 2017. The building continues to operate as a single commercial property.