Knocklofty House, Knocklofty Demesne, Co. Tipperary

The house in County Tipperary is, in the words of architectural historians Maurice Craig and the Knight of Glin writing in 1975, "extremely complex, being rebuilt and added to at different periods", a quality that rewards careful looking rather than a quick glance from the driveway.

The original structure, dating to around 1790, was a relatively modest affair: a narrow, seven-bay, three-storey block with end stacks, meaning chimney stacks positioned at either end of the building rather than rising through the interior. That central core still exists, though it was substantially reworked in the early nineteenth century to accommodate a two-storey library and the main staircase. The rebuilt section is rendered, its plain exterior surface distinguishing it from uncoated stonework, and finished with a blocking course, the low, flat parapet that runs along the roofline to give the facade a clean, horizontal termination. The wings extending to either side belong to a slightly earlier phase, largely late-eighteenth century in character, giving the overall composition a layered quality in which different decades sit alongside one another without quite resolving into a single coherent style. Bence-Jones, writing in 1988, dates the house broadly to the eighteenth century, a designation that is technically accurate but obscures just how much continued to change after that.