122 Melmount Road, Sion Mills, Co. Tyrone, BT82 9EU

122 Melmount Road is a semi-detached Arts and Crafts house built around 1905, situated on the east side of Melmount Road at the southern end of the Sion Mills Conservation Area in County Tyrone. Together with its listed neighbour at 124 Melmount Road, it forms a symmetrical pair that makes an attractive and cohesive contribution to the streetscape, enhanced by a low stone wall running north to south in front of both properties. This wall also visually connects the pair to the nearby Church of the Good Shepherd and its hall.

The house is two storeys tall with two bays and is rectangular on plan, with a rear return to the east that has been further extended eastward. There is a lean-to extension at the re-entrant angle of this return, and a canopy over the entrance to the north. The structure is timber-framed and roughcast. The roof is pitched and slightly sprocketed, clad in clay tiles with clay ridge tiles, timber bargeboards and boxed eaves, and finished with half-round cast-iron gutters and downpipes. A central red brick chimneystack with a stepped cap and vertical banding serves both halves of the semi-detached pair, and a smaller rear chimneyshaft of similar style on the return is designed for a single chimneypot.

The principal west elevation, which faces onto Melmount Road, features a rectangular bay window with a timber-framed canopy supported on decorative timber corbels and covered with a clay tiled roof. To the left of the bay window is a small rectangular one-over-one sash window with horns. At the roofline, the two houses share a dormer window with a pitched roof, tile-hung cheeks, and decorative timber framing to the apex. The windows across the house are irregularly spaced and sized; the majority have been replaced with UPVC frames, and all have painted concrete sills.

The north elevation contains the main entrance, where a four-panelled timber door with bolection mouldings is accessed by a concrete step and sheltered by a timber-framed canopy with timber squinches and a clay tiled roof. A Victorian-style lamp stands to the right of the door. This elevation has six irregularly spaced and sized windows, including one at attic level. The attic storey features decorative timber framing and two raised timber bands running horizontally at head and sill level, the upper of which is dentilled. The rear east elevation carries a red brick chimneystack on the return, and there is a small UPVC skylight on the rear pitch. A painted brick wall forms the boundary to the neighbouring back yard.

The listing covers the house and the walling to the front. The property is set back from Melmount Road, with access provided through a gap in the wall via two low steps shared with the neighbouring house. A large rectangular garden lies to the rear.

Sion Mills was a company-owned model village established by Herdman & Co., a flax spinning mill run by the Herdman family, which provided housing and healthcare to its workers and village maintenance staff until the village was privatised in the mid-1960s, when the mills needed to raise capital during a slump in the linen industry. When Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Hall toured the area in 1843, they recorded their admiration for the conditions at the mills, describing full employment for some 700 workers living in sound and comfortable cottages, with a school and Sunday school that the Herdman family attended themselves, and workers who could be heard playing in a full band or singing and dancing during the evenings. A census taken in July 1874 recorded 1,008 persons living in 136 houses in the village, with many residents being lodgers as the workforce fluctuated: in March 1889 there were 1,113 workers, falling slightly to 1,096 by February 1897. The Herdman Diaries from between 1900 and 1910 noted that the supply of workers was considerably influenced by the available accommodation. This house first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1905, captioned "The Villas." It was added to the Valuation Revisions that same year, recorded as a house, initially vacant but occupied by 1907, leased from E. T. Herdman at a valuation of £10 10s. The adjoining property at 124 Melmount Road was built in the same year under separate tenancy, also leased from E. T. Herdman. When the company eventually sold off the village houses in the early 1960s to raise capital, prices ranged from £60 for the smallest properties to £120 for two-storey houses. Jeremy Williams, writing in Architecture in Ireland (1994), places Sion Mills within this broader tradition of enlightened industrial patronage in the Irish countryside.