Shanlis House, Shanlis, Co. Louth

It is an odd detail for a country house of this scale, and it is precisely the sort of flourish that turns a competent piece of Italianate architecture into something worth stopping for.

Shanlis House was built in 1858 for Henry Milling, to designs by the architect John Neville, and it follows the Italianate idiom that was popular for gentry houses of the period: a detached five-bay, two-storey block over a basement, with a hipped slate roof, red brick chimneystacks with stepped stone caps, and roughcast rendered walls set off by smooth quoins at the corners and around the central bay. The entrance porch projects from the east front, framed by Doric pilasters, an order of classical column recognisable by its plain, unfluted simplicity, supporting a frieze and cornice above a timber door with raised-and-fielded panels. Cast-iron gutters, moulded and carried on paired brackets under the eaves, run the length of the roofline, while the ground-floor windows are given the fuller decorative treatment, with kneed architraves and those animal-head brackets, whereas the first floor makes do with plainer moulded surrounds. The effect is a house that is formal and correct in its overall massing but playful in its detailing, as though Neville allowed himself a private joke in stone and render that most passers-by would never notice.

The approach itself is part of the composition: a tree-lined avenue leads from the road to the house, entered through wrought- and cast-iron gates flanked by matching railings, a sequence that would have been designed to build anticipation before the house came into view. Once at the door, the encaustic tiled porch floor and the limestone steps up to it are worth a second glance, small survivals of the original scheme that often disappear from houses of this age through wear or replacement. The animal-head brackets remain the detail to seek out, low enough on the ground floor to be examined properly, and rare enough in Irish country house design that they are unlikely to have been a stock architectural pattern rather than something specific to this commission.