Bellamont Forest, Cootehill, Co. Cavan

At Bellamont Forest, the main stairs are squeezed into a narrow space off the entrance hall, with none of the drama that country house visitors might expect. Yet upstairs, an encircling bedroom lobby ringed by Tuscan columns and topped with an oval lantern delivers exactly the kind of architectural set piece the stairs withheld, an oblique nod to the centralised geometry of Palladio's Villa Rotonda. It is a house that rewards patience, built of red brick on an exposed rise above the Dromore River, its solidity and symmetry doing quiet work to anchor a building that could easily have felt precarious on such a site.

The house dates from around 1730 and is generally reckoned the earliest and finest Palladian villa in Ireland, designed for the Coote family by their cousin Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, who died in 1733 after a brief but consequential career. Pearce trained under the English Baroque architect Sir John Vanbrugh and went on to design the former Parliament House on Dublin's College Green along with Summerhill House in County Meath and townhouses on Henrietta Street, but Bellamont Forest survives as his most complete built statement of Palladian principles. The square, compact plan borrows directly from Andrea Palladio's Italian villas: paired Venetian windows with continuous sills, pedimented surrounds, and a Doric portico standing forward of the facade rather than recessed. That portico was originally intended as an open loggia set within the plan, which would have eaten into the entrance hall, but building it prostyle instead gave the house a more generous hall, suited the Irish climate better than an open arcade would have, and lent the entrance a certain moral gravity thought fitting for its patron. Inside, the plasterwork is finely tooled, and the principal rooms hold carved marble and stone chimneypieces alongside marble busts of the Coote family. The house is also unusual in Ireland for expressing a mezzanine storey on its north and south elevations, a detail later echoed by Richard Castle at Russborough and Bellinter. To the north-west, farm and stable yards, along with entrance gates and gate lodges, form a working group of demesne buildings that once kept the whole estate running, and a tunnel still connects the house to outbuildings to the north-east.

The rear elevation repays close attention: its three recessed central bays and paired Venetian windows with blind side lights are quieter than the entrance front but carry the same careful grammar, right down to small side lights lighting the basement windows below. The Doric portico itself rewards a slow approach up its flight of steps, where the entablature's metopes are carved with musical instruments, an unexpected flourish on an otherwise disciplined facade.