Ballynestragh, Ballynestragh Demesne, Co. Wexford

Rebuilding after fire is not unusual in Irish country house history, but few sites announce the year of their resurrection quite so plainly, stamped into the very fittings meant to carry rainwater off the roof. What stands at Ballynestragh today is that rebuilt house, a compact, near-square block of five bays and two storeys with a dormer attic, its windows shrinking in size as they climb from ground floor to first floor, a device that makes the building look taller and more composed than its actual footprint would suggest.

The house replaces an earlier residence on the same ground, described at the time of its destruction as a fine property set ablaze and burned to the ground, according to a report in The People newspaper in March 1923. That earlier house belonged to Senator Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde, and its loss was part of a wave of country house burnings during the Irish revolutionary period. The Esmonde family's connection to the estate did not end with the fire; the baronetcy passed down through Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Laurence Grattan Esmonde, then Sir John Lymbrick Esmonde, Sir Anthony Charles Esmonde, and Sir John Henry Grattan Esmonde, spanning the twentieth century. The replacement house was designed by Dermot St. John Gogarty, an architect working from Merrion Square in Dublin, and its style draws on the Georgian Revival then fashionable for such rebuilds, with a high-pitched roof whose sproketed eaves (a flaring of the rafters near the eaves, a device associated with the English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens) give the roofline a distinctive silhouette. A colonnaded loggia, meaning an open gallery with a row of columns, survived from the earlier house and remains as a physical link to the building that burned.

The house sits within a landscaped setting that includes a large ornamental lake to the front, positioned so the principal rooms would have looked out across water and parkland, a deliberate piece of siting rather than accident. The walled garden and a now-ruined gate lodge belong to the same estate and continue to shape its character as a group, even where they have fared less well than the house itself. The main block's yellow brick, laid in Flemish bond (a pattern alternating headers and stretchers along each course) with contrasting flush quoins at the corners, remains largely intact, along with the timber panelled front door with its carved coat of arms and the sash windows retaining much of their original detailing.