Ratheane Private Nursing Home, 50 Mountsandel Road, Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, BT52 1JF

Ratheane Private Nursing Home is a detached asymmetrical gabled multi-bay two-storey rendered building built around 1890, with a four-stage tower to the centre. The building is irregular on plan, facing east and set within its own paved grounds on the west side of Mountsandel Road.

The original late nineteenth-century structure has been substantially altered and extended. It features hipped natural slate roofs with roll-moulded terracotta ridge and hip tiles, rendered chimneystacks, timber bargeboards to gables, and fascia to boxed eaves supporting replacement metal rainwater goods. The walling is painted ruled-and-lined render with a moulded plinth course, continuous first floor sill course and panel rusticated rendered quoins.

Window openings are generally segmental-headed with masonry sills, architrave surrounds and uPVC windows throughout. The asymmetrical front elevation comprises a pair of double-height gables, a set back wing to the left and a central square-plan four-stage tower with a double-ogee slate roof and copper ball finial. Windows are arranged in pairs to the gables with hood mouldings, set over a pair of canted bay windows sharing a single slate roof. The tower windows have hood mouldings. A flat-roofed entrance porch was added to the re-entrant angle around 1985. The secondary south side elevation is six windows wide with three full-height gables and a bay window, featuring a string course between floors and hood mouldings to all window openings—segmental-headed to the first floor, square-headed to the ground floor. Two three-storey L-plan extensions abutting the rear were built between 1980 and 2010, obscuring the original rear elevation.

Originally built around 1891 as a private dwelling house called Ratheane by Henry Hezlett Henry, the property first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1904. The house was constructed at a cost of £3,000 and valued at £85 as a newly-built vacant dwelling. Henry Hezlett Henry died before occupying the residence. His widow and siblings inherited the property, but all had passed away by the late 1890s. The house was unsuccessfully offered for sale at auction in 1897, 1898 and 1899. Contemporary newspaper advertisements described it as being "replete with every comfort and convenience" with "all the latest sanitary arrangements". The accommodation included dining and drawing-rooms, a morning-room, library, mistresses' and butlers' pantries, lavatory, plate-room, seven bedrooms and dressing-room, bathroom and linen-closet. The property also contained a fern house, servants' apartments and was supplied with hot and cold water throughout. The enclosed yard to the rear contained stabling for four horses, stalls for nine cows, harness and coachman's rooms, and coach, coal, boiling, fowl, tool and wash houses connected by a covered passage.

The 1901 census records John Boyd Greaves, a general draper, as occupant of the 21-room first class house, residing with his sister and brother and two live-in servants. The house was subsequently let to Reverend Thomas Doey and Mrs Charlotte Doey in the 1920s. In 1924 it was purchased by the Trustees of Coleraine Cottage Hospital and converted into Ratheane Hospital following alterations by architects William and Maxwell Given. The 1949 Ordnance Survey map shows little change to the plan form. Valuer's notes from the 1930s record accommodation comprising public wards of three to five beds and private single-occupancy rooms, two operating rooms and living quarters for nurses including seven bedrooms. The building was described as "well-built and well-finished" with "lofty, well-lighted and airy" rooms. The hospital was taken over by the Northern Ireland Hospitals Authority in 1951. Following health service cuts it was recommended for closure in 1976 and eventually closed in 1982.

The building was taken over as a private nursing home in 1985 and has since been extended several times, most recently undergoing major refurbishment and the addition of a new wing containing 11 bedrooms. The site is set back from Mountsandel Road and enclosed by a low rendered wall with a bitumac front drive and forecourt. A single-storey rendered former gate lodge stands at the road boundary.