Rossana House, Rossana Upper, Co. Wicklow

The building lost part of its fabric around 1950, a demolition whose reasons go unrecorded, but what remains is a substantially intact five-bay, three-storey block of red brick laid in Flemish bond, a bricklaying pattern that alternates the long and short faces of each brick along a course, producing a chequered texture that was fashionable among Irish country houses of its period. That the house still stands coherent despite its truncation is unusual in itself; many partially demolished houses collapse into ruin or are stripped for salvage, whereas Rossana has kept its proportions and detailing legible.

The house dates to around 1720, placing it firmly within the early Georgian period, when Irish landowners were beginning to favour the restrained, classically influenced brick architecture that would dominate the century. To the rear, on the west side, two projecting three-storey bays break the wall plane, one canted with flat angled sides and one bowed with a continuous curve, a combination that suggests the architect or builder was experimenting with variety within a single elevation rather than settling for uniform repetition. The east front carries a later addition, a timber door surround with paired pilasters and a broken base pediment, an architectural feature where the triangular or curved pediment above a doorway is deliberately left open at its base, framing a part-glazed panelled door set into a semi-circular arched opening. Elsewhere the windows mix semi-circular arched heads with plainer flat ones, fitted with timber sash windows in both six-over-six and three-over-three arrangements, a small but telling sign of alterations made over different decades. The roof is double-piled, meaning it is formed of two parallel pitched sections running side by side, and finished in natural slate with cast-iron guttering and downpipes; the chimneystacks are rendered and set with tall flues arranged diagonally, each topped with clay pots, a detail that adds a slightly restless silhouette to an otherwise disciplined design.

The house sits within a demesne that is well wooded, the kind of planted estate landscape that often accompanied houses of this social standing, screening the building from immediate view and framing it within mature trees rather than open ground. For anyone tracing the development of early 18th century domestic architecture in Ireland, the value of Rossana lies precisely in this combination of age, surviving brickwork, and the layered evidence of later interventions such as the replacement door surround, all of which make it a marker of continuity and change on the same walls.