Dictionary of Irish Architects 1720 - 1940

Selected: CO. ARMAGH, DRUMBANAGHER HOUSE

Name: PLAYFAIR, WILLIAM HENRY #
Building: CO. ARMAGH, DRUMBANAGHER HOUSE
Date: 1829-1837
Nature: Italianate house for Maxwell Close and his wife, Anna Elizabeth, sister of Charles Brownlow, builder of Brownlow House. Built in Scottish sandstone. Cost: £80,000. (Demolished.)
Refs: Drawings, letter books and ledgers from Playfair's office in Edinburgh University Library; PRONI VAL 1B 217 & VAL 12B/15/23 A-E (ref. from Brett, op. cit., below); Angélique Day & Patrick McWilliams, Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Vol. 1: Parishes of Co. Armagh, 1835-9, 52; J. Binns, Miseries and beauties of Ireland (1837), 66-7; J.P. Lawson, Gazetteer of Ireland (1842), 345; J.B. Burke, Visitation of Seats & Arms, (2nd ser., 1855), I, 193-4; High Dixon, Ulster Architecture 1800-1900 (UAHS, 1973), 10(no. 13) Ian Gow, '"An Architect's Melancholy": furniture by W.H. Playfair for an Irish House', Irish Arts Review 14 (1998), 57-61(illus.); C.E.B. Brett, Buildings of Co. Armagh (1999), 271-2(illus.);  Kevin V. Mulligan, The Buildings of Ireland: South Ulster (2013), 361.