Country house, Frankfort, Co. Cork
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What survives at Frankfort in County Cork is an 18th-century country house that manages, even in its reduced state, to convey something of its original composure.
The north-facing entrance front presents five bays to the world, with sash windows set into shallow reveals, and a central half door topped by a fanlight, the semicircular or elliptical glazed panel above a doorway that was a standard grace note of Georgian domestic architecture. Some of the original glazing is still in place, which is more than most houses of this age and condition can claim.
The building is three storeys over a basement, with the bowed ends common to later 18th-century Irish house design, where curved two-bay projections softened the geometry of an otherwise rectangular block. The hipped roof, which slopes on all four sides rather than terminating in gable walls, sits above two chimneys placed off-centre, a small asymmetry that suggests the internal layout was arranged around function rather than strict facade symmetry. To the rear, later additions extend the footprint, and a curved curtain wall draws a connecting line between the house and the gable end of the farm buildings behind it, binding the domestic and agricultural elements of the estate into a single composition. At the time the building was last formally described, restoration work was under way, though the structure was noted as being in poor condition.
