Rokeby Hall, Rokeby, Co. Louth

The main house, seven bays wide and rising two storeys over a basement, is more restrained in its language, but restraint here is deliberate. The walling and window surrounds follow a consistent, almost austere rhythm, ashlar limestone dressed and coursed with care, so that when the design does allow itself decoration, at the pedimented breakfront on the north front, the effect is concentrated rather than diffuse: four Ionic pilasters, their capitals carved with volutes, frame the first-floor openings and carry a pediment bearing a coat of arms in its tympanum.

The house was built around 1785 for Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh, whose ecclesiastical income evidently extended to some of the finest domestic architecture available in Georgian Ireland. Its first architect was Thomas Cooley, a figure associated with major public buildings of the period, but Cooley died in 1784, before the house was complete, and the commission passed to Francis Johnston, who would go on to become one of the most prolific architects of his generation. That handover shows in the building's character: a design of considerable discipline, where the ornament is reserved for a single, carefully composed set piece rather than scattered across the facade. The entrance itself repays a closer look, with a round-headed doorway holding varnished timber doors of six raised-and-fielded panels, a fanlight patterned like a spider's web, and a flight of splayed limestone steps flanked by wrought-iron railings and carriage stops, the small furniture of Georgian arrival still largely intact.

The demesne survives as more than just the house. An entrance gate to the east and a stone stableyard and outbuildings to the north-west remain part of the original setting, giving Rokeby Hall the rare completeness of a country estate whose working and ceremonial parts have not been separated by later development. The rear of the house tells a quieter, more provisional story by comparison: a plain door with concrete steps added around 1950, and a scattering of aluminium windows among the original timber sashes, evidence of a building that has been lived in and adjusted rather than preserved as a museum piece. Taken together with the glasshouse and the stable complex, the ensemble forms a group whose architectural interest lies as much in that accumulation of periods and purposes as in any single facade.