Portlaoise Railway Station, Station Road, Portlaoise, Co. Laois

The two-storey façade, with its jumble of gables, pointed and multi-centred window openings, and blind arches, gives no obvious clue that behind it lies simply a staircase down to the platform. That disguise was deliberate: the multiple gables and broken roofline were designed to create drama and visual interest, masking the plain functional business of getting passengers from street level to trackside.

The station opened in 1847 to the design of Sancton Wood, an English architect who had won the competition two years earlier to design Kingsbridge Station in Dublin, now known as Heuston, for the Great Southern & Western Railway Company. His success there led to his appointment as the company's architect, and in that role he produced the stations along the line between Monasterevin and Limerick Junction, most of them in a gabled, picturesque Gothic idiom that owed something to the Tudor style, with its steep gables, decorative timber bargeboards, and irregular massing. Portlaoise is one of the more elaborate results of that commission, built against the railway embankment with a station master's house folded into the main block. Compared with the similarly positioned station at Monasterevin, also by Wood, Portlaoise is markedly more theatrical and less restrained, its asymmetry more pronounced, its gables taller and more insistent.

The building's two faces tell different stories. Toward the town, the two-storey Tudor Gothic front, built in snecked ashlar limestone on a plinth course, presents an entrance tucked onto a side elevation and flanked by a single-storey bay that once served as an open porch and ticket office. Toward the tracks, the building drops to a single storey, with asymmetrical gabled bays at each end, a waiting room in one gable and offices in the other, and a lower arcaded section between them where a stairwell descends behind timber-columned arches. The variety of openings, square-headed, round-arched, pointed, and multi-centred, all finished with chamfered stone surrounds, gives the walls a restless, decorative energy rarely found in a working station of this size, and together with the adjoining building it remains one of the more significant nineteenth-century public structures in the town.