Glanmore Castle, Nun's Cross, Co. Wicklow

Glanmore Castle is a country house that has been quietly subdivided, its rear elevation, once the service side, fitted with flat-roofed porches that now serve as the public face of four terraced dwellings. The result is a building that reads, at a glance, as a single-minded castellated composition, but which has in fact absorbed a second life without losing its outline.

The house was built in 1804 for Francis Synge, a member of parliament, to designs by Francis Johnston, an architect closely associated with the castellated Gothic style favoured by Irish gentry in the decades either side of 1800. Johnston's design gave the house a one-bay breakfront that climbs to three storeys over its basement, punctuated by bartizans, the small turreted projections often used on tower houses to allow a narrow lookout or a decorative flourish at roofline level. Circular towers mark each corner, and the parapets throughout are castellated and pitched high enough to hide the roof structure from view at ground level, an arrangement that gives the whole building a fortified silhouette regardless of its domestic function. That function did not survive the twentieth century intact: by the 1940s the house had fallen into dereliction, a fate common enough among Irish country houses of the period, many of which lost their original families, their upkeep, or both. Glanmore's recovery came in 1975, when it was restored and converted into four terraced houses, a conversion that explains the porches now grafted onto what was once the rear of the building and the replacement casement windows set into its flat-headed openings.

The house sits within a demesne, the enclosed and typically wooded estate lands historically attached to a country house, and the tree cover remains a defining part of its setting. Little of Johnston's original interior arrangement would necessarily survive a conversion of this kind, but the exterior, towers, bartizans, and castellated parapet included, still presents the silhouette he designed, now sheltering a domestic arrangement he could not have anticipated.