The country house at Roxborough in Co. Kerry does exactly this. South-facing, three-bayed, with a central doorway and a rectangular overlight above it, the building offers a composed, almost formal front elevation, and then quietly drops the pretence around the back, where rough stone is left visible and a two-storey hipped projection pushes out from the east end of the rear elevation.

The house is L-shaped in plan, two storeys, with a hipped roof, a central well, and chimneys positioned slightly off-centre to the front and centrally to the rear. Parts of the structure may go back to the mid or late eighteenth century, suggesting the building accumulated rather than arrived fully formed. By the 1840s, the Ordnance Survey Name Books recorded that it had been rebuilt in 1813, which places a significant reworking of the house in the years just after the Act of Union, a period when many Irish landed families were consolidating or modernising their properties amid considerable economic and political uncertainty. The 1813 rebuild would account for much of what survives today, though the earlier fabric beneath or behind it complicates any simple reading of the house as a straightforward Regency structure. The window frames visible now are of more recent date, the kind of quiet domestic updating that happens across generations without much ceremony.