Quinsborough House, Parteen, Co. Clare

The effect is architectural rather than domestic; this is a house designed to be approached, viewed, and read as a composition, with the gate lodge at the entrance acting almost as a prelude to what follows.

The core of the house dates to around 1765, a plain three-bay, two-storey block under a hipped slate roof, its walls rendered and finished with a moulded cut-stone cornice at the eaves and a continuous sill band tying the window levels together. Nearly a century later, around 1850, the end bays were given full-height canted bay windows, a Victorian addition that pushed outward into the garden and let more light into the rooms while updating the house's silhouette without disturbing its Georgian proportions. The centre of the front is marked by a limestone tripartite doorcase, a triple-part composition of door and flanking sidelights, reached by a flight of steps; the openings elsewhere have been altered over time and fitted with replacement joinery, the kind of small change that accumulates in any building still in use.

What makes the place unusual, though, is the survival of its flanking elements. A pair of two-storey pavilions stands to either side of the main house, each pierced by a lunette window, the small semicircular openings that Palladian-influenced architects liked to tuck under a roofline, at first-floor level. These pavilions are tied back to the house by single-storey screen walls, three bays wide, decorated with round-headed niches and pierced by square-headed limestone gateways for pedestrians, a device that let people move between the wings without breaking the formal front. At the demesne entrance, a single-bay gate lodge carries a pedimented portico of two columns set in a shallow porch, prostyle meaning the columns stand forward of the wall, diastyle meaning they are spaced two column-diameters apart, a fairly generous gap by classical convention. The approach itself is framed by cut-limestone panelled piers and cast-iron gates set into curved walls, the whole arrangement forming a rare, more or less complete example of how an Irish gentry residence choreographed the visitor's arrival, from public road to private door, through a sequence of gates, walls, and flanking structures rather than a single dramatic gesture.