Bushmount House, Knockercreeveen, Co. Kerry

The effect is of a house living two lives at once, its ground floor updated for comfort, its basement quietly holding onto Georgian joinery that elsewhere on the building has been swept away.

The house dates to around 1810, a detached five-bay structure of two storeys over that raised basement, its centre door reached by a curved flight of steps rather than a straight run, an arrangement that lends the entrance a slight formality without tipping into grandeur. At some point it was extended to the north-west with a lean-to return, itself five bays and two storeys, with a projecting bay at its centre. The roofline is pitched and hipped, finished in slate with lead flashings along the ridges, and the walls throughout are painted roughcast render over what was originally rendered brick. To the north-west stands a separate stable block, seven bays long, built in rubble stone and dated 1831, which once had a segmental-headed carriage arch built into it, the kind of opening designed to let a horse and carriage pass straight through the building rather than around it. A circular limestone plaque set into the two-storey outbuildings reads "Domk Rice 1831", a rare instance of a building openly naming a patron or builder and fixing a precise year to the stonework, and beside the carriage opening a rain barrel was built directly into the structure, an practical arrangement for catching water off the roof.

The approach from the south still runs through a gateway contemporary with the house itself, cut-stone piers dating to around 1810 that would have framed the first view of the building for anyone arriving by carriage. The square-headed doorway at the front is flanked by curved walls and limestone piers, with nosed limestone steps leading up to a timber double-leaf door, a sequence of details that rewards a slow approach rather than a quick one. Much of what survives here is in the meeting of eras: an entrance sequence and gateway from the house's construction, a stable range from two decades later, and windows that tell, floor by floor, which parts of the building were changed and which were left alone.