15 Ardcame Road, Strabane, Co Tyrone BT82 0LT

A detached three-bay two-storey house built around 1930, located on the south side of Ardcame Road in the townland of Castlemellan. The building is L-shaped in plan, with a two-storey projecting bay to the west further abutted at ground floor by a canted bay, and a single-storey veranda porch set into the re-entrant angle to the west.

The roof is hipped natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles and deep overhanging eaves supported by corbelled brackets. Yellow brick corbelled chimneys have ornate concrete coping and clay pots. The walls are roughcast with smooth rendered quoins over a smooth rendered plinth. Windows throughout are square-headed timber-framed 2/4 sliding sashes set in smooth moulded architraves with painted masonry sills. Cast-iron gutters and round downpipes serve the rainwater system.

The principal elevation faces west. The left bay contains a pair of windows at each floor. The central bay has a timber entrance door at ground floor beneath a pair of windows at first floor. At ground floor level, an ornate openwork timber veranda with an asbestos tiled roof abuts the bays. The projecting right bay features a canted bay at ground floor with windows to each cheek and a pair of windows at first floor.

The north elevation contains pairs of windows at each floor to left and right, a single window to each floor at the centre, and a timber entrance door to the extreme left surmounted by a transom light in a smooth moulded architrave. The east elevation has a timber entrance door and window at ground floor, with two windows at first floor. The south elevation was not surveyed.

The house is set within mature gardens, bounded from the road to the north by roughcast walling surmounted by concrete coping. Access is provided through a pair of wrought-iron gates supported by square roughcast piers with rendered coping to the north-west, and pedestrian access through a wrought-iron gate supported by a pair of square roughcast piers with plain concrete coping to the north-east.

The building can be dated stylistically to the early twentieth century and first appears on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map of 1936. It first appears in valuation records in 1933, with the owner and occupier being W J Gibson. The initial valuation was subsequently revised from £7 5 shillings to £26, and outbuildings from £3 15 shillings to £4 5 shillings, undated changes that may indicate the house was valued during construction and revalued upon completion. At that time the main house comprised eight rooms, a kitchen, bathroom and water closet with hot and cold water. Associated outbuildings to the east, largely composed of rubble masonry and slate with some corrugated iron walls or roofs, included an old dwelling house, motor house, two byres and a barn, and were used for hens, pigs, potatoes and turnips.

A substantial and characterful building of its time with local significance, the house does not however meet the criteria for listing and is recorded here for reference only.