Collis-Sandes House, Oakpark Road, Tralee, Co. Kerry

Collis-Sandes House wears its Venetian Gothic Revival styling with unusual confidence for a private residence: ogee arches with alternating brick and limestone voussoirs, trefoil-headed window openings, cusped reveals, and a porte cochere, the covered carriage entrance that allowed visitors to alight from a vehicle without stepping into the rain, all point to a design vocabulary more often associated with civic or ecclesiastical building than domestic life.

The house was built between 1857 and 1860 to designs by the architect William Atkins for Maurice Fitzgerald Sandes, and its irregular plan reflects that ambition: a recessed bay with a limestone ashlar box window on one side, an advanced two-storey end bay with a canted bay window on the other, and a seven-bay lateral wing running back on a cruciform plan, its arms projecting to north-east and south-west. Around 1925 the house gained a substantial addition to the south-east, a double-height chapel built in red brick with lancet arch windows and a limestone ashlar apse, a change that anticipated its next role. By 1939 the building was in use as a convent, the chapel presumably serving the community housed there, before the property passed into use as a school, which it remains. The stable complex to the north-west, built around 1860 and arranged about a courtyard, survives largely intact, with its limestone-built ranges and lancet-arched relieving arches over the door openings echoing the Gothic detailing of the main house, and a pair of red brick piers with iron gates still marking the entrance to the yard.

The garden front retains its terrace, with brick and limestone walls, decorative urns and limestone steps leading down from the house, though the wider grounds have since been given over to a golf course, a use that has left the immediate setting of the house rather different from what Sandes and Atkins would have known, even as the building itself, with its grouped brick chimneystacks banded in limestone and its cast-iron gutters and downpipes, continues to carry the weight of its original design.