The entrance front, dated 1709, carries a relatively plain doorcase with a segmental pediment. Walk around to the garden side, however, and you meet something altogether more theatrical: a Baroque doorcase dated 1723, reached by a formal flight of steps and clearly designed to impress anyone arriving from the river. That the south shore of the Shannon estuary was treated as a principal approach rather than a rear aspect says something interesting about how the house related to the landscape around it, and how movement along the water once mattered as much as movement along any road.

The house was begun around 1709 by John Bury and completed by his son William around 1723, a fourteen-year span that accounts for the shift in architectural ambition between the two doorways. The architect is thought to have been a member of the Rothery family, though this has not been confirmed with certainty. The building is five bays wide, two storeys over a basement, with a hipped roof, a dormered attic, and two tall chimneystacks built in patterned brickwork, an unusually decorative choice for structural elements that might easily have been left plain. Two L-shaped wings flank the main block, their mullion and transom windows adding a slightly earlier flavour to the composition. Set to the east of the house, a pigeon house survives with its honeycombed interior largely intact. Dovecotes of this kind were common features of early modern Irish demesnes, providing a source of fresh meat and eggs, and the survival of the interior structure here is relatively rare.

Shannongrove sits on the south shore of the Shannon estuary in County Limerick. The house is a private property, so access to the interior and grounds is not publicly available. The exterior and its setting can be appreciated with attention to the wider estuary landscape. Those with a particular interest in early eighteenth-century Irish domestic architecture will find the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage record, compiled by Denis Power, a useful starting point before visiting the area.