Aghadoe House, Knoppoge, Co. Kerry

Look closely at the pink sandstone walls and limestone plinth and the join between old intention and later repair becomes part of what there is to see.

The house was designed by the architect William Atkins and built around 1860, though it may incorporate elements of an earlier house on the site dating to 1828. Atkins worked in what is known as the Lombardo Romanesque style, an eclectic revival mode borrowed loosely from northern Italian Romanesque church architecture, recognisable here in the round-arched windows, the heavy cornice, and the limestone ashlar portico with its four columns arranged in a shallow porch. The composition is asymmetric: an advanced two-storey block sits at the centre, flanked on one side by a flat-roofed entrance bay and on the other by a projecting bay built on an octagonal plan, with a long service wing trailing off to the north-west. In 1922, during the Irish Civil War, the house was burnt, a fate shared by many country houses of the period. It was extensively reconstructed around 1925, and the fabric visible today largely reflects that rebuilding rather than the original 1860s work. Later in the twentieth century the house was renovated again, this time for use as a youth hostel, a conversion that has kept the building in use rather than left it to decline.

Around the house, the outbuildings tell their own story of a working estate. A stone-built stable, also dating from around 1860, is arranged on a U-shaped plan with a central block pierced by segmental-headed carriage arches, the kind of wide, flattened arch designed to let a horse and carriage pass through comfortably, flanked by projecting end bays. A separate rubble stone outbuilding from the same period has an open arcade and now stands derelict, its roofless walls a plainer counterpoint to the main house's careful detailing.