Aghareagh House, Aghareagh, Co. Longford

The rest of the façade is plain almost to the point of severity, five bays of six-over-six sash windows arranged with strict symmetry across two storeys and a half-basement, but that restraint is precisely what makes the entrance sing. Cut limestone sills, a limestone-coped parapet over the basement, wrought-iron railings flanking the front steps: nothing here is accidental, and all of it points back to the doorway as the one permitted flourish in an otherwise disciplined design.

The house dates to around 1810, built for the Judge family, who may have been established at Aghareagh as early as 1794. By the 1820s the property had passed to the Mullaniff family, later recorded as Mullaniff O'Beirne, and Slater's Directory of 1881 names a Joseph Russell as resident. Ownership shifted again in the twentieth century, when the Land Commission, the state body that redistributed Irish estates through the 1800s and 1900s, held some 48 acres at Aghareagh by 1973, land that almost certainly included the house itself. Behind the building stands a walled garden and a group of outbuildings, and to the rear a walled yard survives too, entered through rendered gate piers hung with wrought and cast-iron double gates, evidence that this was once a working estate rather than simply a residence.

The house sits back from the road amid grounds still mature enough to frame it properly, with the main entrance gate positioned to the southeast. Approached this way, the sequence works as it was designed to: parkland first, then the rubble-built walls partially exposed at the rear, then the front elevation with its rigid rows of windows, and only at the last moment the surprise of the Ionic doorcase and its fanlight, the one piece of ornament the house allows itself.