Doonass House, Doonass Demesne, Co. Clare

Doonass House is a solid, symmetrical block, three bays deep with a recessed breakfront, its hipped slate roof rising to paired chimney stacks capped in ogee-moulded limestone, an S-shaped curve popular in classical detailing. Six-over-six sash windows, the ground floor set in shared elliptical-headed recesses with sidelights, are framed in concealed red brick surrounds, a construction technique where brickwork does the structural work behind a rendered or cut-stone face left visible to the eye. The approach is still marked by limestone piers with fluted friezes and pyramidal caps, holding a pair of wrought-iron gates finished with spearhead ornament, though the grounds around them have long since gone to seed.

The house was built in 1820 by Sir Hugh Dillon Massy, and it appears, small and distant, in an 1842 sketch made from the vantage of White's Castle at Castleconnell by Captain Thomas Hastings, a naval officer and amateur artist. After Massy's death the house passed to a second Sir Hugh Dillon Massy and his wife, Dame Mary Dillon Massy, and it remained in the family until 1919, when it was sold by Colonel John Massy Westropp. Its most unlikely chapter followed in the later 1920s, when it housed a contingent of German engineers and scientists brought to Ireland to work on the Shannon Scheme, the ambitious hydroelectric project that harnessed the river to supply the new state's first national electricity grid. In June 1926 some of these men found themselves before Limerick District Court, accused of running a shebeen, an unlicensed drinking house, from Doonass; the case ended with the confiscation of their cellar, some 1,500 bottles of wine valued at £700. Later still the house belonged to Benyamin Weizmann, son of Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, who demolished an eighteenth-century wing built in 1786 beside the stable yard, reducing the house to something closer to its present footprint.

What remains today is essentially the 1820 core, its cavetto-corniced eaves and panelled timber consoles intact above walls of roughcast render on a chamfered limestone plinth. The central doorway, reached by three bull-nosed limestone steps, still holds its fanlight and panelled timber doors, a reminder that for all the changes in ownership and use, the house's original Georgian proportions were never substantially altered, only, in the end, quietly shortened.