Saint Dominic's Secondary School, Ratoath Road, Navan Road, Dublin 7, Co. Dublin

Nothing about the composition was planned at once. The oldest section, a modest single-storey house over a basement, sits at the centre like the seed from which the rest grew, its red brick laid in the neat overlapping pattern known as Flemish bond, its window openings framed by moulded stone surrounds that hint at a level of finish above the ordinary farmhouse.

That house began its institutional life in 1835, when the Dominican order took possession of the site in what was then open country to the north of Dublin. It appears on the first Ordnance Survey map, drawn up two years later, simply captioned "Nunnery", a single building standing alone in its fields. By the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch survey was carried out in 1907, the picture had changed considerably: quadrant wings and pavilion blocks had been added around 1880, linking the old house to newer three- and four-storey ranges built piecemeal between about 1880 and 1920 to serve the convent's expanding role as a school. Only the north range remained unbuilt even by then, the last piece of a complex that took the better part of a century to complete. Architectural ambition sharpened as the community grew: the pavilion blocks carry rusticated quoins, fluted entablatures and open pediments, and their tripartite windows are set within aedicules, a classical device where an opening is framed like a miniature shrine with columns and a pediment of its own. The main entrance to the old house is similarly dressed up, its panelled door flanked by engaged Ionic columns beneath a stepped, dentillated entablature, reached across a granite platform and steps bridging the basement below.

A further storey was added to the original house around 2007, a reminder that the building has never stopped adapting to its use as convent and school. Details worth noticing include the contrast between the crisp brick and granite of the earliest and grandest sections and the plainer roughcast render of the later ranges tacked on as need arose, and the aediculated stone doorcase on the north range, with its spoked fanlight and Doric pilasters supporting an open pediment, a smaller echo of the grander entrance at the centre of the complex.