Country house, Lotabeg, Co. Cork

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Country house, Lotabeg, Co. Cork

The entrance to the Lotabeg demesne near Cork is announced not by a modest gate lodge but by a full Ionic triumphal arch, an architectural gesture more Roman processional route than rural County Cork.

That arch was the work of George Richard Pain, one of the most accomplished architects working in Munster in the early nineteenth century, and it sets an appropriately confident tone for the house beyond.

The house itself was built around 1800 to the design of Abraham Hargrave, and its northern entrance front is carefully composed: a curved three-bay bow projects from the centre, its middle window tripartite, flanked by two bays on either side. The doorway is framed by Ionic columns, the classical order characterised by its scrolled capitals, which carry a wide fanlight above, with narrow sidelights and a vertical half door below. The southern garden front takes a plainer approach, running to five bays with a limestone string course, a horizontal band of stone that separates the basement storey visually from the floors above. The roof is hipped, meaning it slopes on all four sides rather than ending in gables, and four chimneys rise from it, two of them sitting on a central flat platform. A later single-storey extension to the west has three long round-headed windows looking out onto a terrace, and its own gabled roof ends in a cut limestone pediment. Inside, the feature that drew particular attention from architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones was a cantilevered staircase, one in which the stone treads project from the wall without visible support beneath, a feat of construction that was a point of considerable pride in houses of this period and quality.

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