Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

continuing on Ranelagh while we’re at it.

Charlemont street which leads onto Ranelagh Road had a great number of very varied houses including this double roofed, three-storey, on the east side where a modern apartment block now stands.

This is one of the handful of twin roofed houses that I suspect may possibly not have originally been a ‘twin-Billy’, but which may have been assembled instead using a ‘twin-Billy’ pattern roof during some kind of semi-conscious transitional phase when the fashion priority had switched to presenting an all-important flat parapet to the street, but when many of the carpenters engaged were still hammering out the roof structures that they had perfected in their apprenticeship.

On the same side of the street, half a mile further out past the Triangle in Ranelagh, a similar house [Cullenswood Lodge] stood on the presently empty site to the left of the slightly Post-Modern block with the banded red and yellow brickwork.

And then there’s this pair on Mount Pleasant Avenue Upper facing the back of Leinster Cricket ground.

Perhaps the most butchered houses in Ranelagh. At this stage we may never know what these houses were, each has been sub-divided, dumbed-down and bulked-up for years culminating in the rebuilding of the distinctive facade of the right-hand house last year, completely without planning permission [only internal alterations were advertised and a feeble survey drawing submitted]