Radisson BLU Farnham Estate Hotel, Farnham, Co. Cavan

It was built around 1780 for one house, then salvaged when that house was pulled down, and eventually relocated to the north-east elevation of its successor, where it survives as the sole physical trace of an entire vanished phase of building. Walk through it today and you pass, in effect, through the front door of a house that no longer exists, into one that does.

The house behind that portico was built in 1802-3 for John James Maxwell, second earl of Farnham, to designs by Francis Johnson, one of the leading architects working in Ireland in the early nineteenth century. It replaced an earlier house of around 1780, itself an addition to a house dating to about 1700; both of these earlier structures were demolished around 1960, leaving only the Doric portico as a physical link to the site's Georgian past. That portico is attributed to James Wyatt, the English neo-classical architect whose influence on country house design in this period was considerable. The nine-bay, three-storey house that Johnson built is arranged over a basement on a quadrangular plan beneath a hipped slate roof, with rendered chimneystacks and cast-iron downpipes still doing their quiet structural work. Its garden façade is the most legible survival: a central pedimented breakfront, carrying the carved coat of arms of the Maxwell and Barry families, sits above three tall round-arched openings at ground level, one of which has since been converted into french doors. Square-headed sash windows diminish in size as they rise through the storeys, a common device for making a tall house appear settled and proportionate from the ground. Inside, an enfilade of reception rooms retains historic plasterwork and joinery, and a slender cantilevered stone staircase rises through an elliptical hall, a piece of structural bravura that depends on weight and geometry rather than visible support. In the early twenty-first century the house was joined to an extensive new hotel wing by a glazed lobby, a deliberate and legible seam between old fabric and new use.

The wider demesne around the house has kept much of its supporting cast: entrance gates, lodges, outbuildings, workers' houses, a walled garden, woodland and parkland all survive, giving a sense of the estate as a working landscape rather than a single isolated building. It is worth remembering, looking at the garden front with its balanced openings and pedimented centre, that what appears as a single coherent composition is in fact the result of at least three phases of building compressed into one visible façade, with a relocated eighteenth-century portico doing service as the entrance to a very different building than the one it was made for.