Re: Re: Dundalk

Returning to a building that was profiled here before, this grand c. 1800 house with Edwardian shopfront was recently ‘restored to its former glory’, with a ghastly developer shopfront installed in place of the pretty right-hand residential window – now unlettable – and badly detailed Georgian sash windows in place of the perfectly appropriate Victorian sashes seen here before works got underway.

The above was the completed result, yet here it is barely two years later.

It’s extraordinary how a building can deteriorate so markedly in such a short space of time. Of course the job was superficial from the outset, with paint slapped over render and rainwater goods that needed repair, cheap sash windows that were falling apart before the job was even finished, and a roof that was never repaired and is now worse than ever – all for the usual cheap buck that plastered over the past seven years of non-productivity in the Irish economy.

The sash windows of the top floor were also inappropriately designed with squat little horizontal panes of glass – a big no no in classical principles of proportion. One need only copy and paste a pane formation from the floor below to demonstrate that these should have been three-over-sixes with tall rectangular panes, as shown to the left-hand window.

The adjacent building, seen above, looks extremely ancient and requires further investigation. It’s not protected at the minute.