The western entrance front, with its three-bay bows flanking a pillared porch and a hipped roof finished with a modillion cornice, a classical detail in which brackets support the projecting eaves, reads entirely as a mid-nineteenth-century composition. Yet step inside and the plasterwork on the ceilings belongs to a much earlier moment, a quiet reminder that the bones of the original house are still present beneath the remodelling.

By 1842 the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the property under the name Arbutus Lodge, and the decades that followed brought considerable expansion. A stairway addition was made to the north-east, and towards the end of the nineteenth century a ballroom was added to the east wing, the kind of appendage that signals a household with social ambitions and enough space to indulge them. Later changes drew the neighbouring property into the picture too: former outbuildings and a two-storey lodge that had once belonged to the adjacent Trafalgar House were absorbed into the east end of the complex. The architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones noted the building in his 1978 survey of Irish country houses, by which point the layered character of the place was already well established. That accumulation of additions, each generation leaving its own mark on the fabric, is what gives the building its slightly uneven, evolved quality, less a designed whole than an argument conducted in stone and plaster over the course of a century.