Phillipstown Manor, Phillipstown, Co. Carlow

The house rises two storeys over a basement, with a dormer attic tucked into the roofline, and it has held onto its early window openings rather than being reworked wholesale in the Victorian period, as so many Irish houses of this vintage were. The centrepiece is a pedimented breakfront, a projecting section of the facade capped with a triangular gable, at the heart of which sits a round-headed window, its curved top picked out in cut stone. The same careful stonework runs through the doorcase, the sills and the eaves course, giving the whole facade a consistency that speaks of a single build rather than a patchwork of later additions.

The mid-eighteenth century was a period when Ireland's landed families were building with confidence, favouring plain, well-proportioned classical facades over ornament, and Phillipstown Manor sits squarely in that tradition. The choice of a pedimented breakfront with a round-headed opening was a way of adding formality and visual weight to the centre of an otherwise restrained elevation, a common device in Irish Georgian architecture that drew on Palladian models filtering through from England and the continent. Inside, the house preserves an open well staircase, a design in which the stairs wind around a central open space rather than being enclosed, allowing light from above to fall through the full height of the building. Such staircases were often the most architecturally ambitious element of a house's interior, and their survival, along with the original fenestration outside, suggests that Phillipstown Manor escaped the kind of heavy-handed remodelling that stripped many comparable houses of their early character.