Country house, Killee, Co. Cork

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Country house, Killee, Co. Cork

What makes the country house at Killee quietly arresting is the way its working farmyard has been dressed up in the architectural language of something far grander.

The one-storey farm buildings that extend from the flanks of the main house present their east-facing walls as though they were the facades of a minor palazzo, with ornate round-headed niches and pavilion-like end bays arranged in shallow breakfronts. It is an unusual sleight of hand, using decorative stonework normally associated with pleasure grounds or walled gardens to give a utilitarian yard an air of composed formality.

The house itself dates from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and is built on a straightforward two-storey plan with a basement to the rear. Its entrance front faces east across five bays, with a central porch reached by iron steps, sash windows on either side, and a hipped roof above with a central valley and deeply projecting eaves. The rear elevation is slightly narrower at four bays, the asymmetry presumably a consequence of the sloping ground. A mid-nineteenth-century gate lodge marks the entrance to the property at the far end of a long avenue, and the approach itself carries a quiet historical layer: the avenue crosses a single-arched bridge that sits adjacent to the site of Killee church and its graveyard, placing the house in a landscape already long inhabited before the first stone of the house was laid.

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Pete F
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