Braganstown House, Mansfieldstown, Co. Louth

Underneath the crenellated parapets and the porte cochere, the carriage porch that allowed visitors to step from their transport straight into shelter, sits a plain five-bay, two-storey house dating from around 1790. The mismatch is deliberate, and it is what gives the building its character: a Georgian frame reworked into something that wants to look older, grander, and vaguely castellated.

That reworking happened in 1846, when the architect Thomas Smith took the original late eighteenth century house and remodelled it in the Elizabethan style then in vogue among Irish landed families. This was a period when Gothic and Elizabethan revival architecture offered a way to suggest ancestral depth and romantic seriousness, even for houses that had started out as fairly restrained Georgian boxes. Smith's additions to the entrance front, the double-height crenellated sections and the porte cochere, sit alongside label mouldings over the windows, a detail borrowed from medieval stonework that channels rainwater away from the openings below. The rendered walls and pitched slate roofs, with their rendered chimneystacks rising above the crenellated parapet, complete the effect. The timber sliding sash windows, meanwhile, are a quiet reminder that beneath the revivalist skin, the house's Georgian bones are still doing the structural work. A stableyard to the south east, built in 1824, predates Smith's remodelling by more than two decades and hints at the working life of the estate before the architectural theatrics of mid-century arrived. The mature grounds around the house have grown into the setting over time, softening the boundary between the building's two distinct architectural personalities and giving the whole composition a settled, layered feel that neither phase could have achieved alone.