Coláiste Sailíseach, Pallaskenry, Co. Limerick

At Coláiste Sailíseach, the two sit together comfortably enough that a visitor might assume the whole complex grew up at once, until the difference in register becomes clear: the restrained Georgian proportions of the house against the more ornamented, church-like massing of the chapel wing to its south-west, with its render cross set into the gable and a chevron motif worked around the porch doorway.

The house itself is an L-plan structure, its front block four bays wide and two storeys high, with a full-height porch marking the entrance and a moulded doorcase whose pilasters and roll-moulded arch frame a fanlit timber door. A longer eight-bay range runs east, given rhythm by canted bay windows at each end and a two-bay breakfront at its centre. These are the kind of architectural devices, projecting bays, breakfronts, sill courses in tooled limestone dividing the storeys, that were used on houses of this period to break up long facades and suggest hierarchy within a plan without resorting to excess ornament. Salesian priests took up residence here in 1915, and for a period the house operated as an 'Aspirante', a school preparing boys who intended to enter training for the priesthood, a specific and now largely vanished category of institution within Irish Catholic education. The chapel was added in 1937, its seven-bay nave and single-bay chancel giving the community a dedicated space for worship separate from whatever domestic chapel or oratory the house may have held before. Today the building continues in institutional use as an agricultural college, its outbuildings, gate piers, and sweep walls to the south suggesting the working farm that would have supported both the school and its residents.

The chapel rewards a slow look at its openings: round-headed windows to the front, round-based ones to the south, and a run of clerestory windows above, all fitted with coloured glass rather than plain panes, which changes the quality of light inside considerably depending on the hour. The main house, by contrast, keeps its Georgian restraint, with two-over-two and one-over-one pane sliding sash windows set into render surrounds, and a limestone plaque fixed to the chapel's front recording something of its own history in stone rather than in any archive. The outbuildings to the south, including one reduced now to a stone gable and floor plan with an oculus opening ringed in red brick voussoirs, hint at a working yard that has thinned out over the decades even as the main house and chapel have kept their footing.