Stradbally Hall, Stradbally, Co. Laois

The house was built in 1772 as a nine-bay, two-storey Georgian block over a basement, a solid and unfussy design typical of its period, but a century later its architects reversed the building's orientation entirely, turning what had been the rear elevation into the new entrance front. At the centre of that new front they placed a tetrastyle Doric portico, a columned porch with four Doric columns supporting a pediment, borrowed from classical temple architecture and used here to announce arrival on what had once been the back of the house.

The original design came from Arthur Roberts, working in the plain, well-proportioned idiom common to Irish country houses of the 1770s. Nearly a century later, between 1866 and 1878, the house was extensively remodelled by the firm of Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon in an Italianate style, a fashion that drew on the villas and palazzi of Renaissance Italy and was popular for country house renovations in Victorian Ireland. Rather than replace the Georgian structure outright, the firm reworked it, most strikingly by flipping its principal aspect and dressing the new front with the classical portico that still defines the building's appearance. The estate as it survives also includes a stable complex and a group of detached gate lodges, the smaller structures that once marked the entrances to the demesne and housed gatekeepers or estate staff.