Bendhu is the strange white house you can’t quite stop looking at on the twisting road down to Ballintoy Harbour. A Cornish art teacher named Newton Penprase started building it in 1936 and was still at it in 1952, mixing and pouring the whole thing by hand, bucket of cement by bucket of cement, into a stack of cubes, portholes, parapets, sunken rooms, cliff stairs and animal sculptures. Locals called it ‘the house that was never finished’, because every time it looked done Penprase found another view or idea and kept going. The name itself – Bendhu, or Bendoo, ‘dark place’ – is borrowed from the basalt cliff that walls in the little cove below.
Be clear about what a visit is, though: Bendhu is a private home and always has been, so you look from the road and go no further. Treat it as a two-minute photo stop on the way to the harbour rather than a destination in its own right.
The house and its builder
Penprase, born in Redruth in Cornwall in 1888, came to Northern Ireland to study and then teach at the Belfast College of Art, and found in the dramatic Antrim coast an echo of home. Rather than the local lime and stone, he worked in poured concrete, shaping an art deco composition by eye and without a single fixed plan, which is why it reads more as sculpture than as a conventional house. An accident in his later years stopped the building work, and Bendhu sat unfinished for a long stretch; he died in 1978, and it was a later owner who eventually brought it to completion.
For all the official objections during its making, Bendhu was given Grade B1 listed status in 1992, and the present owners – who took it on in 1993 – have conserved it since. If the story grabs you, the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society’s book Bendhu and its Builders, by Andrew Cowser, tells it in full.
Seeing it
You are looking at the outside only, so the pleasure is in the detail: the clash of cubes, squares and ovals in smooth white concrete; the portholes set at odd heights; the narrow stairs that seem to climb the rock; the animal figures worked into the walls. Early morning and late afternoon are best, when low light throws the geometry into relief and the white render plays off the sea behind it.
Practical information
- Access: Free to view from the public road; the house is a private residence with no interior access, visitor centre or facilities.
- Parking: None at the house. Use the Ballintoy Harbour car park at the foot of the hill and walk back up – the lane is narrow, twisting and has nowhere safe to pull in beside the house.
- Timing: Go in daylight. The cliff descent is awkward after dark, and the house only photographs in good light.
Pair it with the harbour itself – the Game of Thrones filming location below – and with Ballintoy Parish Church at the top of the hill, its stepped white gable a few minutes back along the road. Carrick-a-Rede and the Giant’s Causeway are both a short drive west.