Newstown House, Newstown, Co. Carlow

The result is a facade that reads as formal and confident from straight on, but softens and rounds itself the moment you step to one side, a detail that rewards walking the length of the building rather than admiring it from a fixed spot.

The house dates to around 1824 and is attributed to Thomas Cobden, an architect whose name turns up repeatedly in the country houses and public buildings of the period, working in the restrained classical idiom that granite and Doric detailing typically signal. A Doric portico, the plainest and sturdiest of the classical orders, was a common way for a house of this standing to announce itself without excess. At some later point the building was part remodelled under James Sands, meaning the house as it now stands is not a single moment frozen in 1824 but a layering of two hands, the original design and a subsequent reworking, a common enough fate for houses of this type that were altered as tastes or family circumstances changed. Inside, the sequence of rooms is entered through a colonnaded hall, a passage lined with columns that would have set the tone for a visitor before they reached any of the principal rooms, and several interiors retain their chimney pieces and enriched friezes, the decorative plasterwork run around the top of a wall or ceiling, both of which point to an interior that was intended to be seen and appreciated as much as the exterior.

The five-bay, two-storey form is a standard grammar for houses of this date and status, five window openings across the front, two floors of accommodation, but the addition of the bow windows on the sides pushes it slightly away from the purely formulaic. Anyone looking at the building is best served by taking in both the frontal view, where the portico dominates, and an angled view from the side, where the bows introduce a curve into what is otherwise a very rectilinear composition. The survival of original interior features such as the colonnaded hall and the friezes suggests that later alterations, whatever James Sands changed, did not strip the house of its earlier character entirely.