Newhall House, Newhall, Co. Clare

Seven bays wide and two storeys tall, it presents a symmetrical face broken by a three-bay canted projection rising the full height of the building, flanked by single-bay bow windows on each side elevation that terminate in their own conical roofs. The effect is of a house that wants to be looked at from several angles at once, and the survival of its brick panels over the first-floor windows and cut-stone string course gives the walls a crisp, almost graphic quality even now.

The house is generally dated to around 1765 and its design has been attributed to Francis Bindon, an architect associated with several substantial Irish country houses of the period, though there is a suggestion that the fabric of an earlier building from around 1650 may be incorporated somewhere within the structure. Bindon's hand can plausibly be read in the confident massing and the carved limestone doorcase, a shouldered architrave topped with a pediment, which frames a timber panelled door at the entrance. Behind the main block, an eight-bay wing of two and three storeys steps down in scale, roofed in a plain pitch rather than the hipped slate of the front range, and finished with a cut-stone eaves course and brick chimneystacks that mark it as service accommodation rather than showpiece architecture. The Flemish bond brickwork, laid with alternating headers and stretchers in each course, ties the whole composition together and was itself a mark of quality building in eighteenth-century Ireland.

Approaching the site, a visitor passes a pair of gate lodges flanking the entrance, small single-storey structures with round-headed niches and lancet-arch openings and distinctive diagonal corner piers, though these are now derelict and add a slightly melancholy note to what is otherwise a well-kept approach. The entrance itself is marked by cut-stone piers with cast-iron gates and railings, a conventional but effective introduction to the avenue beyond. Inside, the house is understood to retain a number of its original interior features, though the principal interest for anyone approaching from the road remains the sculptural quality of the exterior, particularly the play between the flat brick planes of the main elevation and the rounded projections that punctuate it at either end.