Gate lodge at Finnebrogue House, 9 Finnebrogue Road, Finnabrogue, Downpatrick, Co Down, BT30 9AA

Gate lodge to Finnebrogue House, built around 1885–6, designed by architect W. J. Gilliland for Robert Perceval-Maxwell. It is a good example of picturesque free style architecture in red brick, set at the main entrance to the Finnebrogue estate on the north side of Finnebrogue Road, roughly a mile north of Downpatrick. The building has group value with the adjacent gate screen, the main house, and the other listed buildings on the estate.

The lodge is characterised by various steeply-pitched gabled bays, a Westmorland slate roof, a tall prominent chimneystack with corbelling, moulded string courses, and decorative brick and terracotta mouldings. Outside the rear elevation and the conservatory, the external walls are in red brick with moulded verges, decorative terracotta, and a base course and window cills in stone. The main roof is largely covered in Westmorland slate, with decorative terracotta ridge tiles and finials to the gables. There are small metal skylights to the south side of the roof. Rainwater goods are metal, with square downspouts, moulded guttering, and decorative hoppers.

The asymmetric front elevation faces roughly east and is dominated by a large two-storey gabled bay. To the right (north) side, this bay merges with a single-storey hipped-roof porch topped with a decorative, slightly Tudoresque balustrade. The porch has a semicircular-headed doorway with a bevelled architrave formed in shaped brick and a brick drip moulding over it. The doorway is filled with a semicircular-headed door whose upper half is glazed. This door is a recent replacement: previously the door was of regular rectangular form with a semicircular fanlight, but the hallway floor level was raised slightly, making it necessary to change the door as well. To the left of the doorway, on the gabled bay proper, is a plain sash window with a bevelled stone cill flush with the rest of the façade. Above window level is a moulded string course that continues across to the porch, with a second string course above this merging with the top of the porch balustrade. The upper floor of the gable contains a window matching that below. The gable is finished with a decorative eaves moulding with moulded kneelers. To the left of the large gabled bay is the short east face of a small single-storey gabled projection whose gable faces south; this face contains a single plain sash window, smaller than those on the main bay. To the right of the gabled bay is the east face of a large single-storey gabled bay whose gable faces north; this face is blank.

The south elevation is asymmetrical. To the far left is a very shallow single-storey bay with a small sash window. Directly above this at first-floor level the façade is slate-clad — part of the recently added rear extension — and has a gabled half-dormer with a small plain sash window. To the right of this at ground-floor level is a relatively large single-storey timber conservatory, also added recently, in painted timber with a slated gabled roof. To the right of the conservatory is a narrow plain sash window with a much smaller window directly above it at first-floor level. Further right is a tall single-storey gabled bay with a pair of tall plain sash windows to the gable, and a single shorter plain sash window to both its short east face and its short west face. The gable of this bay has a decorative moulded terracotta course, a small slit opening, moulded brick eaves, and a slated roof. Several moulded string courses run across the south elevation at first-floor level.

The north elevation is asymmetric. To the far left is the north face of the porch, which contains a small plain sash window. To the right of this is a large single-storey gable with a group of three tall plain sash windows, a small slit vent opening to the gable, and decorative moulded terracotta eaves. To the right of this bay is a single-storey hipped-roof section with a small plain sash window to the left. This section originally began as a much smaller projection with a mono-pitched roof that faced into an enclosed rear yard, leaning against the north wall of that yard. It was heightened and altered as part of the more recent enlargement to the rear.

The rear elevation is also asymmetrical. To the left is the single-storey hipped-roof section described above. On its north face there is an opening to the left that appears to have originally been a doorway but now functions as a window, with a fixed-light pane to the top and timber sheeting below. To the right of this is a timber-sheeted door with a small glazed panel. Further right, the ground floor of the hipped-roof section merges with the ground floor of a large two-storey portion that makes up the bulk of the recently added extension. At ground-floor level there is a double sash window, with a larger double sash window set into the first-floor gable above. The gable itself is slate-clad on all faces and is jettied, oversailing the ground-floor façade by a significant amount. The ground floor of this elevation is in an untidy mixture of snecked rubble and brick, the brick belonging to the original portions of the walls.

The lodge was built to serve as the gate lodge for a repositioned main entrance to the Finnebrogue House estate. Some sources, most notably J. A. K. Dean's The Gate Lodges of Ulster: A Gazetteer (Belfast, 1994), attribute the design to William J. Fennell; however, original plans of the building dated August 1885 are signed by architect W. J. Gilliland, photocopies of which are held within the Monuments and Buildings Record. Prior to the mid-1880s, the entrance to the Finnebrogue estate was set slightly to the west of the present gateway. The stone gate pillars belonging to the original entrance, which may be of the late 17th or early 18th century, can still be seen to the rear of the house. The building was extended at the rear some time after 1976, when the originally largely open yard was built over. The jettied first-floor portion to the rear and the conservatory to the south were added after 1995. To the east side of the lodge is the main drive to Finnebrogue House, with entrance gates a few metres to the southeast.