Mill House, Garranlea, Co. Tipperary

Instead of sitting centrally, balanced between matching windows, the entrance to this former miller's house is pushed out to the end bay, giving the whole composition a lopsided, almost improvised feel. It is a small departure from convention, but it is enough to make the building stop you in your tracks, especially once you notice the care lavished on that off-centre porch: a spoked fanlight and a carved limestone surround that would not look out of place on a much grander townhouse.

The building is in fact two structures knitted together: a three-storey, two-bay former mill standing beside a slightly recessed miller's house of the same height, both raised around 1810. The mill's working windows tell their own story of function dictating form, with narrower six-over-six pane sashes lighting the first floor where machinery would once have run, and paired two-over-two pane windows below at ground level. The house, by contrast, was given more generous twelve-over-eight pane windows front and back, a domestic touch distinguishing living quarters from workspace under one continuous half-hipped, slate roof. Slate hanging on the rear wall, a practical nineteenth-century method of weatherproofing exposed elevations by covering them in overlapping slates, along with roughly dressed limestone and sandstone quoins, points to the quality of stonemasonry that went into even the utilitarian faces of the building. The boundary walls carry the theme further, their castellated parapets and Tudor-arch pedestrian entrance with brick voussoirs giving the whole site a faintly fortified, playful air that has little to do with milling and everything to do with a nineteenth-century taste for picturesque detail. A ruined structure survives to the north, and a small outbuilding to the south, its segmental-headed carriage arch still intact, hints at the working yard that once surrounded the mill.

Look closely at the porch when you visit: the timber panelled double doors and their fanlight are the most refined element of the whole building, disproportionately elegant for what is, structurally, a side entrance. The contrast between the mill's plain, repetitive window bays and the ornamental flourishes reserved for the house and its castellated walls is worth pausing over, a reminder that even buildings built for grain and machinery could carry ambitions of style.