Roundwood House, Roundwood, Co. Laois

Step through the front door and the space opens upward through two full storeys, ringed by a pair of cantilevered galleries, balconies that project outward from the wall with no visible means of support beneath them, held instead by the strength of their fixing into the structure. For a house of this size, built around 1740, it is an unexpectedly theatrical gesture, more the kind of thing one expects in a public building than a private residence tucked into the Laois countryside.

The house itself follows a familiar formula for the period: five bays across, three storeys over a part basement, with a pedimented breakwork forming a shallow projection at the centre of the facade to give the front elevation some rhythm and depth rather than a flat, uniform run of windows. What lifts it out of the ordinary is that double-height hall, a spatial extravagance that would have announced itself the moment a visitor crossed the threshold, long before they reached any of the more conventionally proportioned rooms beyond. Such halls were a way of making a statement in miniature, compressing the grandeur of a great house into a single dramatic volume, and the galleries here would have allowed the family or their guests to look down into that space from above, turning the hall into something closer to a small theatre.

A stable complex survives on the site as well, a reminder that a house of this standing needed the infrastructure of horses, carriages, and the staff to manage them close at hand, even where the main dwelling itself was not especially large by the standards of the grandest Irish country houses of the period.