Country house, Curraghconway, Co. Cork

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Country house, Curraghconway, Co. Cork

Four days after a fire tore through this late eighteenth-century house in Curraghconway, County Cork, a record of what had been lost was quietly updated.

The house was completely gutted on 24 July 2016, and what remained was a shell that had once been a carefully composed piece of Georgian domestic architecture, the kind of building whose details repay close attention even when, eventually, those details are all that survives.

The house was a two-storey structure over a basement, probably dating from the 1780s or 1790s, and its design showed the considered elegance typical of modest Irish country houses of that period. The southern entrance front was curved rather than flat, a relatively unusual choice that gave the facade a gentle, sweeping quality. At its centre sat a doorcase with sidelights incorporated into the frame and a large fanlight above, the whole composition supported by composite pilasters and columns. Composite here means a classical order combining elements of the Ionic and Corinthian styles, a slightly ornate choice for a rural house of this scale. The eastern and western elevations carried bow projections, and the east bow included a round-headed stairway window. The northern front presented four bays, with the basement windows blocked at some point before the fire. A hipped roof with a central valley sat above it all, and traces of weatherslating, a technique in which slates are fixed vertically onto external walls as a barrier against driving rain, were still visible on the facade. By the time the fire occurred, the sidelights, fanlight, and columns on the entrance front had already been blocked up, almost certainly during the building's later life as the headquarters of the Munster Motor Cycle and Car Club, a use that gave this Georgian survivor an unlikely second chapter before the fire ended it altogether.

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