Larchill House, Phepotstown, Co. Meath

Five bays wide, two storeys, its slate roof and timber sash windows all original, it gives little away from the road. The one flourish is at the door: a cast-iron fanlight, delicate and semicircular, set above a panelled timber door within a surround of dressed limestone. Everything else about the place is modest by design, which is precisely what makes its wider setting so unexpected once you know what surrounds it.

Built around 1780, the house was the work of Robert Watson, who did not stop at the building itself. He extended his ambitions outward into the landscape, adding a recessed two-storey wing and outbuilding to the east, a walled garden, and a series of follies scattered across the grounds. Together these elements form what is known as a ferme ornee, an ornamental farm, a landscaping fashion of the period that dressed up working agricultural land with decorative structures and picturesque incident, so that fields and follies were meant to be looked at as much as farmed. It is a rare enough survival in Ireland, and Larchill's version reads as a coherent whole rather than a scattering of afterthoughts: house, outbuildings, garden and follies conceived together as one designed landscape rather than added piecemeal over generations.

Traces of the estate's original approach survive too. A former gate lodge once stood at the entrance, though its openings are now blocked up, and the entry itself is marked by rendered piers fitted with limestone wheel guards, stone blocks angled to protect the piers from the wheels of passing carts and carriages, closed off today by a pair of cast-iron double gates. The house's own details reward a slow look: the rainwater goods are cast iron rather than the plastic replacements found on so many houses of this age, the chimneystacks are rendered rather than left in bare brick, and the window sills are limestone, cut to match the door surround. None of it is grand. All of it is intact, which in a house of this age is its own kind of achievement.