Carhoo House, Carhoo Lower, Co. Cork

They shrink as they rise, six-over-six panes at ground and first floor giving way to three-over-three at the top, a simple trick of proportion that makes a tall building feel settled and correct rather than top-heavy. At the centre, the breakfront, a section of wall projecting slightly forward and topped with its own pediment, carries two of the more unusual window forms found in Irish domestic architecture: a Venetian window on the first floor, three lights grouped together with the outer two narrower than the centre, and above it a Diocletian window, a semicircular form divided into three sections by two vertical mullions, named for its supposed origins in the thermal baths of the Roman emperor of that name. Higher still, a blind oculus sits in the pediment gable, a round opening that never functioned as a window but was left as an ornamental gesture, rendered rather than glazed.

The house was built around 1750, a five-bay, three-storey block of the kind that appeared across the Irish countryside in the decades when landed families were consolidating their estates and their architectural ambitions in equal measure. Its gabled chimneystacks, the shallow depth of its plan, and the restrained pediment over the breakfront all point to this early date, before the fuller, deeper classical houses of the later Georgian period became fashionable. The ground floor has lost some of its original render, exposing the stone and brick beneath, but much of the rest survives intact: the timber sliding sash windows throughout, the panelled front door with its diamond-tracery overlight, and the modest proportions of the door opening itself, all typical of a house built for comfort and status rather than display on the grandest scale. A two-storey extension was added to the rear at some point, and a porch more recently still, but the south front, overlooking the River Lee, remains substantially as it was raised nearly three centuries ago.

Approach is by a flight of limestone steps to the front door, framed by square-profile rendered gate piers and wrought-iron gates set into rendered enclosing walls capped with limestone. It is worth standing back far enough to take in the whole façade at once, since the effect depends on seeing the diminishing windows and the breakfront together rather than in isolation, the kind of detail easy to miss at close range but obvious once noticed.