Balyna House, Ballina, Co. Kildare

It is a rare survival, and a reminder that country houses of this scale were engineered as much below ground as above it. The groin-vaulted ceilings of the basement, a series of stone arches crossing to form a ribbed pattern, once belonged to an earlier house on the same site, absorbed wholesale into the structure that replaced it.

That earlier house was destroyed by fire in 1878, and what stands today was built in 1872 for the O'More family, designed by the architect William Henry Byrne, incorporating the vaulted basement of its predecessor even as the rest of the building rose anew above it. The result is a substantial three-bay, two-storey house over a basement, with a dormer attic tucked into a mansard roof, its front elevation composed with a formality typical of the period: a cut-limestone portico with four columns in the Ionic order, flanked by two-storey canted bay windows that break the line of the façade into projecting curves. The rear elevation takes a different approach entirely, rising to three storeys at a pedimented breakfront, a device architects used to give height and drama to what might otherwise be a flat wall of windows. Inside, the principal rooms, entrance hall, stairhall, drawing rooms and dining room, retain their timber door surrounds, panelled shutters and moulded plaster cornices largely intact, giving a sense of how the house would have been experienced by those who lived and worked in it. As the centrepiece of a planned demesne, the house would have generated considerable employment in the surrounding area, not least in the nearby village of Moyvalley, where estate labour of one kind or another would have touched most households.

The house keeps its distance from the public road, set well back within its own grounds and approached along a formal avenue lined with beech trees, a planting choice common to demesnes of this era, meant to frame the arrival and control the visitor's first sight of the house. The surrounding outbuildings, still standing, complete the picture of an estate that functioned as a working unit rather than simply a residence, with the house itself as the fixed point around which the rest revolved.