Henrietta Street Conservation Plan - The Heritage Council

Fig.5.3.6 No.8, elevation Fig.5.3.7 No.9, elevation
Fig.5.3.8 Parliament House (now Bank of Ireland),
College Green, by architect Edward Lovett Pearce
Fig.5.3.9
No.9, detail of doorcase
door. The house suffered a good deal of alteration in
the 19th century and again in the early-20th century,
losing its original stairway (illustrated in the Georgian
Society Records), the chimneypieces and most of its
original 1730s timber panelling and plaster decoration.
The original secondary staircase, with its closed string
balustrade and Doric newels, however, has survived.
No. 9 (fig.5.3.7)
Built by Luke Gardiner for Thomas Carter, Master of
the Rolls, c.1731, No. 9 is possibly the most important
house from this period in the city. Although there is no
documentary evidence for it, there is a strong suggestion
that the architect Edward Lovett Pearce was responsible
for its design. Pearce was related by marriage through
cousins on his mother’s side to Luke Gardiner’s daughter
Henrietta, as well as to Thomas Carter, and there is
documentary evidence that he had done some survey
work, at least, for Gardiner in a nearby Bolton Street
house, and that he had acted as Gardiner’s agent in the
purchase of the Drogheda estate in 1729 (NLI PC 253
(2); NLI PC 254 (1)). The design of No. 9 however is not
bespoke, being a very close copy in the façade and in its
interior planning of No. 30 Old Burlington Street in London,
Lord Mountrath’s house, which had been designed by
Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell in concert some
ten years earlier. Although such copyism may have been
reasonably common at the time, the design came about
at the height of Pearce’s own period of personal creativity,
engaged as he was in building the unequalled Parliament
House on College Green (fig.5.3.8). Pearce was also
responsible for at least two other five-bay façades, for
Christ Church Deanery, and for Bellamont Forest House
in Co Cavan (as well as many sketch designs), all of
which were imbued with considerable originality and
conviction. However the almost unequalled sophistication
of interior decoration and design in No. 9 was entirely
unprecedented anywhere outside of London at this time,
and it has for a long time appeared that of the architects
resident in Dublin in the 1720s and early 1730s, only
Pearce was capable of producing it.
While the façade is a copy of Lord Mountrath’s house in
London, it lacks the stone architraves on the windows of
the first and second floor which were part of the London
house. Both it and No.10 are three storey over basement,
and in this case five bays wide, giving both houses a more
horizontal appearance than the other residential dwellings
on the street. It is a red-brick façade, with a 19th-century
cement-rendered ground floor. The superb door case
with rusticated Ionic columns, a five-part keystone,
pulvinated frieze and modillioned cornice and pediment,
is perhaps the most exquisite surviving original door
case on the street (fig.5.3.9). A simple square-profiled
cornice separates ground and first floor, while a typically
Campbellian feature of continuous sill course sits below
the windows. A large round-headed aedicular window
with Ionic half-columns on a balustraded pedestal is at
the centre of the façade on the piano nobile. There is a
plain frieze beneath the eaves and the roof has dormer
windows. The ironwork has been restored based on the
original design.
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