Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@newgrange wrote:

Found this today.
Browne Street off Weaver Square.
No date, sorry.

newgrange: that solves a puzzle that’s been bothering me for ages. The house I posted earlier in the thread that’s always been published as Pimlico, is actually your Billy on Brown Street. This explains why I could never get a location on Pimlico to exactly match.

CologneMike: Those three Billys you say were on Meat Market Lane in Limerick are astonishing. Dutch Billys that weren’t faced in red brick are almost unknown, but these three houses appear to have been constructed in rubble stone, with just some brick in the window surrounds.

There was a great house in Kilmainham, known locally as ‘Shakespeare House’, that has been speculated to have been gable fronted, due to the top floor window arrangement, and we know it was built by a Dublin lawyer around 1725 putting it right in the middle of the Dutch Billy boom, but the problem is that it was built entirely in stone. It always seemed to be a bit fancyful to speculate that Shakespeare House (real name; Riversdale House) had a tripple gabled facade and even more so to suggest that the gables were curvilinear and pedimented, but your photograph of the Limerick houses puts a different complexion on this.

That there may have been a vernacular baroque wing of the Dutch Billy movement adds another chapter to the story.

A few remnants of Riversdale House (no. 40 Old Kilmainham) survive, but the bulk of the house was pulled down about 1965. The statue over the front door was of Shakespeare, but that’s too long a story to get into tonight.