Country house, Ballyready, Co. Cork
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A dog-toothed brick cornice is not something you encounter every day on an Irish country house, and it gives this two-storey Georgian building at Ballyready in County Cork a quiet architectural personality that sets it apart from the more plainly finished rural houses of its era.
The decorative detail, formed by setting bricks at an angle so that their corners project outward in a repeating zigzag pattern, runs along the facade as a kind of restrained flourish, paired with large brick chimneys rising from each gable end.
The house dates from the eighteenth century and follows a type that was common among the middling gentry and prosperous farming families of Munster during that period. Its front elevation faces south-east and is arranged across five bays, a symmetrical arrangement that was almost a social statement in Georgian Ireland, signalling order, proportion, and a degree of means. The ground floor carries twelve-light sash windows, substantial openings that would have flooded the main rooms with light, while the first floor has six-light sashes, smaller in scale as the classical hierarchy of a Georgian facade demanded. The house is approached from the north-east by a short, tree-lined avenue, and farm buildings sit to the south-west, a reminder that this was always as much a working agricultural holding as a domestic residence. A porch has been added in front of the central door in more recent times, and there is a further addition to the left of the main block, both of which sit alongside the original fabric rather than replacing it.
