Anaverna House, Ravensdale, Co. Louth

A five-bay Georgian farmhouse of roughcast render and hipped slate roof, it looks, at first glance, like any number of well-kept country houses raised across Ireland in the late eighteenth century. What sets it apart is not its stonework but its architect: a local builder and farmer named Thaddeus Gallagher, whose son would go on to shape the skyline of a city thousands of miles away.

Anaverna House was built around 1790, with returns and extensions added to the north around 1840. Thaddeus Gallagher designed and presumably built it himself, working in the vernacular of the period, hipped roofs, sash windows, a plain rendered facade lifted by careful detailing. His son James had other ambitions. James Gallagher emigrated to New Orleans, anglicised his surname to Gallier, and became one of the most respected architects working in that city, responsible for a number of its landmark public buildings, among them St Patrick's Church. It is an unusual trajectory for the son of a rural builder, from a farmhouse in Ireland to the architectural fabric of a major American city, and it lends Anaverna House a significance that has little to do with its own scale and everything to do with what it produced.

The house has kept much of its original character. The three-bay breakfront on the south elevation carries a stone-coped parapet and a continuous sill course at first-floor level, while the ground-floor windows beneath it sit in recessed rendered surrounds, with round-headed surrounds above at first floor. A timber porch on the same elevation is worth pausing over: fluted pilasters support a frieze decorated with rosette panels, and the whole thing is topped with a decorative glazed fanlight and a carved stone surround, an unusually ornamental flourish for what is otherwise a restrained facade. Six-over-six sash windows run through the main house, giving way to three-over-three sashes in the attic storey and a tripartite sash on the east elevation. The grounds are enclosed by a random rubble wall to the west, with ashlar stone piers and wrought-iron gates marking the entrance, details that speak to a house built to be seen as well as lived in, even if its most famous connection would eventually be made an ocean away.