Greystones Railway Station, Church Road, Mill Road, Greystones, Co. Wicklow

Its Italianate leanings, rendered walls dressed with granite, and windows dressed up with broad, moulded surrounds give it an air more suited to a villa than a stopping point for commuter trains. Most of the working life of a station happens at ground level, yet here the eye is drawn upward, to a first floor animated by shallow corbelled chimneybreast mouldings, decorative brickwork that projects slightly from the wall in stepped courses, purely for visual effect rather than structural need.

The station dates to around 1855, part of the mid-nineteenth-century expansion of the railway network along the east coast, when lines were being extended to serve towns that had previously relied on coastal shipping and coach roads. Whoever designed it clearly had ambitions beyond the purely functional; the detached two-storey building, laid out in multiple bays, was given a projecting single-storey wing on its west side, flanked by smaller projections to north and south, so that the facade reads almost like a small country house rather than a piece of transport infrastructure. The central wing's large opening, now fitted with a glazed replacement door and screen, would originally have framed the main point of entry for passengers arriving from the town. Chimneystacks finished in render with corbelled caps and clay pots continue the decorative theme onto the roofline, which is pitched, covered in artificial slate, and finished with overhanging eaves and verges, all drained by cast-iron rainwater goods typical of the period.

Despite alterations over the decades, the building has kept enough of its original character to remain a recognisable and well-regarded feature of the town, its restrained ornamentation still legible in the window surrounds and roofline even where materials like the replacement glazing mark later phases of use.