Richmond House, Cappoquin, Co. Waterford

Look up at the five-bay front and the windows narrow floor by floor, an old device for making a building appear taller and more graceful than its actual proportions allow, here paired with later bipartite glazing that softens the effect further. The whole composition centres on a Doric portico, four columns supporting an entablature marked with the triglyph blocks typical of that order, and it is this kind of formal, almost theatrical entrance that marks the house out among the domestic architecture of County Waterford. The date usually given for its construction is 1704, though curiously the house does not appear in Taylor and Skinner's road maps of Ireland published in 1778, a gap that has left its early building history slightly uncertain even as the surviving fabric, inside and out, argues for a house of real quality rather than a modest farmhouse dressed up.

The names attached to Richmond House trace a fairly typical arc for an Irish country property: a Michael Keane recorded in 1814 as being "of Richmond, Cappoquin", followed by Major John Henry Alcock, who held the place on lease from Henry Dennehy of nearby Tivoli. It was the sale of the Alcock interest, after the major's death, that produced the house's one recorded moment of real drama. In November 1864 an auction was being conducted on behalf of his widow, Anne Alcock, when the platform beneath the auctioneer, Samuel FitzHenry, collapsed under him. He suffered a fractured thigh so severe that amputation was deemed necessary, and he died within two hours of the operation, a grim footnote reported at the time in The Pilot. Later in the house's history, Gerald Villiers-Stuart and his wife Maud lived there, and it was from Richmond House that Maud wrote, in October 1911, a letter praising D.H. Lawrence's newly published first novel, The White Peacock, a letter that later found its way into the published collection of Lawrence's correspondence.

Inside, the house keeps a good deal of its original character. The central hall has a round-headed arcade carried on a fluted colonette, timber panelled doors with carved surrounds, and a dog-leg staircase with slender spindle balusters rising to a banister that finishes in a carved volute. The two ground-floor reception rooms retain their chimneypieces, one in cut limestone, the other in veined white marble, along with picture rails and moulded plasterwork cornices that point to a level of decorative ambition beyond the ordinary. Even the roof carries its own quiet flourishes, in timber detailing not usually given much attention on a house of this size. Photographs and records show the house standing vacant in 1901, occupied again by 1911, and undergoing repair as recently as 2003, a sequence that suggests a building that has been allowed to fall quiet now and then, but never quite forgotten.