Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

There was also a category of three storey house, that turns up mostly in provincial centres, which had a facade that reduced from five bay to three on the top floor, but which was probably not originally gabled. Below are examples from Dyer Street in Drogheda and just over the bridge in Leixlip. I think these houses are related to the triple gabled house type, but in houses of this type the outer windows on the top storey are invariably centred over the space between the windows below in a way that didn’t happen too often in the case of altered gabled houses where the priority was to match the attic storey windows to the centre of the gable locations above, regardless of the fenestration spacing below.

I think these houses relate to the gabled tradition in that if the triple gabled house type hadn’t existed, it’s unlikely that the reduction in windows on the top floor of a five bay house of this type, in Georgian times, would have been deemed acceptable.