Lisnavagh House, Lisnevagh, Co. Carlow

At Lisnavagh, in County Carlow, the granite bulk of the building visible today is not the full house that its original architect intended, but a deliberately scaled-down version, carried out a century after construction by a team of specialists brought in for that purpose. The result is a Tudor Revival house that still reads as substantial and coherent, its polygonal bay windows and gables intact, even though a portion of what once stood here was quietly taken away.

The house was built between 1847 and 1849, designed by the architect Daniel Robertson for Captain William McClintock Bunbury. Robertson died in 1849, so the completion of the house fell right at the end of his working life. It is a six-bay, two-storey building faced in granite ashlar, laid out on an irregular plan with a porte cochère, the covered entrance porch designed to let carriages draw up under shelter, and finished with the polygonal bay windows and finial-topped gables typical of the Tudor Revival style, a nineteenth-century fashion for reviving the stepped gables, mullioned windows and general silhouette of late medieval English domestic architecture. Stables and a walled garden stand to the rear, part of the working infrastructure that would have supported the house in its original form. In the early 1950s, between 1951 and 1953, the house was reduced in size, a project undertaken by Pamela Drew and Aubyn Peart Robinson with the work overseen by Alan Hope. Reductions of this kind were not unusual for Irish country houses in the mid twentieth century, when the cost of maintaining large nineteenth-century piles, combined with changed economic and social circumstances, led many owners to demolish wings or entire sections rather than let the whole structure decay or become unmanageable. What makes Lisnavagh notable is that the process was handled with enough care that the house retains a convincing architectural identity rather than reading as a truncated fragment.

Anyone interested in tracing the building's history in more depth can consult the September 2019 Building of the Month feature written by Turtle Bunbury, which sets out the Bunbury family's long connection with the property and the details of both the original construction and the later reduction.