Gurteen, 9 Steelstown Road, Londonderry, BT48 8EU

Gurteen is a small, late Victorian villa built between 1880 and 1899. It is situated on Steelstown Road, Londonderry, and is set within a large, well-planted garden divided into three distinct areas.

The house is a single-story gabled structure with natural slate roofing and chimney stacks, including one on the ridge slightly off-centre from the main entrance. It is raised over a basement and accessed by a wide central flight of steps leading to a paved terrace which extends along the entire frontage of the house. The terrace has open balustrades on three sides, descending on either side of the entrance steps. The façade is symmetrical, featuring a central double doorway topped with a semi-circular, plain fanlight. The doorway is recessed slightly with a shallow flat roof just below the main eaves. Flanking the entrance are single sash windows with two panes each. Further out are two canted bays on each side, each containing three sash windows with two panes. A string course runs above the window heads in the bays and the bays are finished with flat roofs set beneath the main eaves. Smooth rendered and painted walls extend throughout the property.

The interior floors are at split levels requiring stairs to descend to the ground floor of the two-bay back return, which has a lean-to roof at its gable. The back return is not centrally positioned relative to the front of the house, and the north wall aligns with the north gable. It features an irregular arrangement of sash windows. A further canted bay, with a flat roof and three sash windows with two panes each, is located on the south side of the back return. The east-facing side of the front portion of the house has two widely spaced sash windows with two panes each. Decorative bargeboards are present on the sash windows of the front block.

The house is shown on Ordnance Survey maps from 1904-1905, but not on earlier maps, suggesting a construction date within the last decades of the 19th century. Prior to Bishop Daly’s occupancy, the property was owned by a medical professional.