Somewhere beneath the present fabric of Carton House in County Kildare, a Dutch-style building with a pedimented breakfront quietly disappeared. We know it existed only because a painter named Van der Hagen recorded it before it was gone. The house that replaced it, and then the house that replaced that, built over the earlier structures so thoroughly that today almost nothing survives of those first incarnations, save an old cornice on the entrance front and walls of unusual thickness, the kind of physical anomaly that hints at buried layers beneath the plaster.

The Talbot family constructed that first Dutch-style building in the late seventeenth century, when the Kildare lands were under their lease. The estate was forfeited to the Crown and sold in 1703 to Major General Richard Ingolsby, Lord Justice of Ireland, who added a two-storey, nine-bay pedimented front with wings connected to the main block by curved sweeps, a composition in the Palladian manner. Palladianism, derived from the work of the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio and fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry, prized symmetry, classical proportion, and the subordination of ornament to geometry. In 1739 the estate passed back to the 19th Earl of Kildare, who engaged the architect Richard Castle to enlarge the house substantially. Castle's intervention was so complete that it erased nearly every trace of what Ingolsby had built. The house was remodelled again around 1815 by Sir Richard Morrison, by which point the Kildare family had been elevated to the Dukedom of Leinster. Around all of this, the demesne grew to cover roughly a thousand acres, laid out with formal landscaping in the eighteenth century and further adjusted in the nineteenth, producing the sweeping grounds that still surround the house today.