Hicks Tower, Coast Road, Malahide, Co. Dublin

Yet that oddity, a defensive structure reworked into something closer to a storybook cottage, is exactly what stands here. The round walls that were once built to deflect cannon fire now support roughcast render, timber casement windows, and a glazed porch, the sort of details more at home in an Arts and Crafts villa than a coastal fortification.

The tower began life around 1805, one of the many built along the Irish coast during the Napoleonic Wars as Britain braced for invasion. These structures were designed with thick walls and a curved profile specifically to make them resistant to bombardment, and their simple geometry made them cheap and quick to erect in numbers. By the early twentieth century, though, the military threat that had justified them was long gone, and many towers around the country were left to decay or were adapted for other uses. This one was remodelled around 1911 by the architect Frederick Hicks, whose name it now carries, into a domestic residence. Rather than disguising the tower's origins, Hicks worked with them: the conical roof and rounded base remain, but a hipped-roof section and a stair block were added to the rear, and a second storey of attic accommodation was tucked in above, lit by flat-roofed dormers. The result reads as a genuine hybrid, part coastal defence, part Edwardian family home, with red clay tiles, roughcast chimney stacks, and an iron weathervane completing the effect.

Look closely at the walls and the join between old and new becomes legible: a base batter, the slight outward flare at the tower's foot that helped the original structure shed cannon shot and resist undermining, survives beneath the unpainted, nap-rendered dressings added in the remodelling. The square-headed window openings with their stone sills and timber frames belong entirely to Hicks's early twentieth-century scheme, as does the glazed, projecting porch at the centre of the composition, an unmistakably domestic gesture grafted onto a building that was never meant to welcome anyone in through its front door.