Glenade House, Gubinea, Co. Leitrim

The colonnade gives the three-bay facade a steady, repeating rhythm, and above the front door, carved into the portico, is a small scene of laurel wreaths and a bird feeding its young; unusually tender detailing for what is otherwise a fairly formal exercise in classical restraint.

Glenade House was built in 1833 as the residence of Cairncross Cullen. It is a single-storey house over a basement, faced in ashlar limestone with a random-coursed basement beneath, and roofed in hipped slate with rendered chimneystacks and decorative modillions, small carved brackets, running along the eaves. The front elevation carries timber sash windows alongside Wyatt windows, a tripartite arrangement popular in the early nineteenth century, with a tall central sash flanked by narrower ones, all set on tooled stone sills. The front door itself sits within the Tuscan portico, framed in limestone with a segmental head, a panelled timber door flanked by stained glass sidelights, and a stained glass fanlight above. Around the house, a walled garden and a group of ruined outbuildings survive alongside a gate lodge, forming a fairly complete picture of the demesne as it would once have functioned, working buildings and formal grounds arranged around the main residence in the way estates of this period generally were.

The setting on Glenade Lough, within its parkland, is as much a part of the place as the architecture itself; the house was clearly sited with the water in mind, and the demesne buildings that remain, however ruined, give a sense of the working landscape that once surrounded a house like this rather than leaving it as an isolated set piece.