Cappoquin House, Main Street, Cappoquin, Co. Waterford

Balustraded and topped with finials, it looks entirely of the eighteenth century, and much of it is a careful copy, rebuilt after fire nearly destroyed the house in 1923. Look closely at the diminishing window sizes as the storeys rise, a deliberate device that makes the building appear taller and more graceful than its actual proportions, and at the silver-grey limestone that catches light differently depending on the hour. The house sits above the River Blackwater with its grounds arranged so that the principal rooms face the water's meandering course and the hills beyond, a positioning too exact to be accidental.

The house was built in 1779 for Sir John Keane, and its design has been attributed to the architect John Roberts, best known for his ecclesiastical work in Waterford city. An 1843 watercolour by R. Armstrong records the house under the name "Belmont", suggesting an earlier or alternative identity now largely forgotten. Its history changed abruptly in 1923, when it was burnt during the Troubles, the period of conflict following the War of Independence in which many Anglo-Irish country houses were targeted and destroyed. Reconstruction ran from 1924 to 1929 under Richard Francis Caulfield Orpen, a Dublin architect who rebuilt the house to reproduce its lost interior almost exactly, down to the plasterwork and joinery. Some of what survives is not original to the house at all: a chimneypiece was salvaged from a Dublin townhouse on Saint Stephen's Green, and the decorative plasterwork was supplied by G. Jackson and Sons, a London firm established in 1780 whose enrichments still appear on the cornices and ceiling roses of the ground-floor rooms. The Keane family's connection to the estate runs across generations, from Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Richard Keane in the early nineteenth century through successive High Sheriffs of County Waterford to Captain Sir Richard Michael Keane, who lived until 2010.

Inside, the double-height staircase hall is lit from above through a lantern, its cantilevered stair rising with slender "spindle" balusters to a banister that curls into a volute at the top. The drawing room retains its Ionic columnar screen and a plasterwork ceiling centred on a raised rose, all part of the post-fire reconstruction rather than untouched survivals, though rebuilt so faithfully that the distinction barely registers. The garden façade, facing south towards the river, is arranged around a breakfront with round-headed openings and fanlights, a quieter counterpart to the more formal Classical doorcase at the front. Walled gardens and outbuildings remain part of the wider estate setting, contributing to a composition that, despite its violent interruption in 1923, still reads as a coherent piece of eighteenth-century domestic architecture.