Russborough House, Russborough, Co. Wicklow

This oblique arrival is one of the quieter oddities of a building otherwise designed for maximum theatrical effect: a central block flanked by matching pavilions, the whole composition linked by curving colonnades, each element stepping down in scale like a piece of stage scenery built in stone.

The house was built between 1741 and 1748 to designs by Richard Castle, the German-born architect responsible for some of Ireland's grandest Palladian houses of the period. Palladianism, drawing on the symmetrical, classically inspired work of the sixteenth-century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, favoured exactly this arrangement: a dominant central block, subordinate wings, and connecting elements that read as a single unified design rather than a cluster of separate buildings. At Russborough, the main block carries a pediment held up by three-quarter Corinthian columns with decorative swags between their capitals, while the pavilion wings, themselves seven bays wide over two storeys, employ the plainer Ionic order on their projecting centre sections. Doric colonnades, their intervals broken by arched niches holding classical statues, sweep outward to link the main house to the wings, and further rusticated walls, arched and topped with small domed cupolas, continue the line to the outbuildings beyond. Every parapet along this granite sequence is crowned with urns, a Georgian flourish repeated so consistently that it becomes a kind of punctuation running the length of the entire composition.

Approach the entrance itself and the theatricality continues at a smaller scale: a broad flight of stone steps rises to a mostly glazed timber door, above which sits a semicircular window shaped almost like an eyebrow. The balustrade piers flanking the steps are topped alternately with urns and heraldic lions, a detail easy to miss when taking in the building's overall scale. The windows throughout are plain flat-headed sashes, some six over six, some three over three, their restraint a deliberate contrast to the ornament concentrated on the doorcase and roofline. Cast-iron rainwater goods, unglamorous but original to the period's construction, still do their quiet work along the rooflines. The demesne surrounding the house is large but left largely unadorned, allowing the building itself, rather than any designed landscape, to remain the sole focus of the composition.