'Antrim House', 73 Main Street, Portrush, County Antrim, BT56 8BN

Antrim House is a three-storey terraced shop with apartments, built in 1895 on the west side of Main Street in Portrush town centre. It replaced an earlier house on the site dating from somewhere between 1833 and 1859. The building is of special interest for its style, proportion, ornamentation, early steel frame structural system, and the related surviving plan form, particularly of the front section. Its age, its association with the former Northern Counties Hotel next door, and its construction as a decorative late Victorian shop in a prosperous seaside resort all add to its significance. The decorative front elevation makes a considerable contribution to the streetscape of this part of Portrush.

The asymmetrical front elevation is finished in painted render and presents a Freestyle façade with a Flemish gable. Running the full height of the façade are slender pilasters at the outer edges, with broader pilasters to either side of the central bay. Above a cornice-like string course and cill moulding at second-floor level, these pilasters continue upward as piers. Between the outer piers there is a short balustrade, while between the inner piers — those rising from the edges of the central bay — there is a Flemish gable with a moulded coping and a small tympanum at the apex. The inner piers are topped with urn finials.

On the ground floor, to the left, is the doorway leading to the apartments. This consists of a recessed panelled timber door with a plain semicircular fanlight, plain pilaster-like jambs, and a moulded archivolt; just above the archivolt is a small moulded gable or tympanum feature. To the right of this doorway is a very broad projecting shop front with a shallow bow and a flat roof, added in the early twentieth century. Originally, this part of the front was occupied by a large mullioned and transomed window with a doorway to the right-hand side. The window has been completely boarded up, though the mullions remain visible, and the doorway has been filled with a recent flat panel door.

At first-floor level, two large square windows with recessed apron panels beneath them sit within a broad, shallow bay flanked by the pilasters described above. Beyond the bay, to either side, is a narrower window of Georgian proportions with a moulded surround and pediment. All of these first-floor windows are boarded up. At second-floor level, within the Flemish gable, there are two windows of Georgian proportions, slightly smaller than the outer first-floor windows. Both have moulded surrounds and timber sash frames with plate glass glazing.

To the rear, an unpainted sand cement render return projects from the main block. It extends to a depth of approximately one standard return at two and a half storeys, then steps up to three storeys across three bays, with one-over-one sash windows to the northern side. The windows at second-floor level are of standard sash proportions; those at first-floor level are of the longer proportions fashionable at the end of the 19th century. The pair of windows closest to the main building are of slightly narrower proportions. A simple rendered chimney with two pots sits at the junction between the main block and the return. The return has a natural slate roof, simply detailed, with walls finished in a mixture of dry dash and cement render, with painted cement render to the ground floor. At ground-floor level on each side, flat-roofed projections extend the building: to the south as far as the site boundary, and to the north as an infill between the return and the adjacent hotel. At the rear, a small section of ground floor is briefly exposed before meeting a retaining wall, and a modern casement window is visible. The end gable is blank apart from a fire exit door at second-floor level, served by a corroded steel external fire escape. The rainwater goods appear to be largely cast iron.

The west gable elevation of the main front block could not be seen from outside, but internal observation shows two windows to the far left at first-floor level, with a further window at a higher half-landing level, all with timber sash frames. To the far right at ground-floor level there is a doorway with a partly glazed timber door and a large, almost square fanlight, set within a small single-storey lean-to projection. Internally, the eastern end of the building has a gabled roof with the ridge running on a north-south alignment, with a short projecting gable at right angles to this on the eastern side. To the western side there is a much longer gabled section also set at a right angle. Only a small section of the western end of the roof was visible from outside; it is slated and has two cast-iron skylights to the north side and one to the south.

The building was constructed for a Mrs Annie Woods at a cost of around £1,300, a sum that contemporary valuers regarded as a considerable outlay given that she held only a 32-year lease. The valuers described it as a house and shop but noted, due to its size, that it was "really two houses communicating." The architect Berkley D. Wise, who extended and renovated the adjacent Northern Counties Hotel, has been attributed by some as the designer of this building, constructed at the same time. A plan in the valuers' office notebook records that the original shop front consisted of a square projecting bay measuring 19 feet by 4 by 12 feet, and that there was originally a narrow open yard to the southwest.

In 1918, Annie Woods leased the property to a Joseph Elkes. Israel Samuels & Son took over in 1929, with the house section occupied by a Joseph Sandford in 1935. The following year the property was purchased by the owners of the neighbouring Northern Counties Hotel and used, it is believed, as a bar and for staff accommodation. It was probably at this point, or slightly later, that the original square shop front was replaced with the present bowed projection, and the narrow two-storey extension was built over the formerly open yard to the south. The Northern Counties Hotel was destroyed by fire in 1990 and subsequently rebuilt on its site. Antrim House escaped the fire unscathed and is now partly used as a store for the new hotel.