Club House Hotel

Terraced three-bay three-storey over basement house, c.1750. Converted to use as club house, 1797. Converted to use as hotel, 1817. Extensively renovated, 1892, with single-bay single-storey gabled projecting open porch added to right ground floor. Part refenestrated, post-2001. Pitched slate roof with clay ridge tiles, rendered chimney stacks, and cast-iron rainwater goods on rendered eaves having iron brackets. Pitched (gabled) glazed roof to porch in cast-iron frame on cast-iron pillars having decorative crested ridge, and decorative open work panel to gable having crested coping. Painted roughcast walls with rendered stringcourses to each floor. Square-headed window openings with cut-stone sills (forming part of stringcourses), replacement one-over-one timber sash windows, 1892, having replacement glazed timber panelled double doors, 1892, to ground floor with casement overlights, and replacement uPVC casement windows, post-2001, to top floor. Round-headed door opening under open porch with five cut-limestone steps, painted cut-limestone Gibbsian surround having keystone, and glazed timber panelled double doors having overlight. Interior with entrance hall having decorative plasterwork cornice to ceiling, segmental-headed opening into stairhall having panelled surround supporting archivolt with keystone, and timber panelled shutters to window openings to upper floors. Road fronted with sections of iron railings to front on painted rendered plinth having cut-limestone coping.

A well-composed substantial building representing an important element of the eighteenth-century architectural heritage of Kilkenny. The ratio of solid to void whereby the openings are comparatively small produces a weighty quality in the composition that distinguishes the site in the streetscape: a pretty porch added during a period when the house operated as the Hibernian Hotel further enhances the street presence of the site. Despite a number of renovation projects over the centuries the house presents an early aspect with much of the historic fabric surviving intact both to the exterior and to the interior where plasterwork details exhibiting good quality craftsmanship identify the artistic significance of the site. The house is of additional importance for the historic role as the Kilkenny (Fox Hunting) Club in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.