Shelton Abbey, Shelton Abbey, Co. Wicklow

Eleven bays wide and two storeys tall, the building wears its ecclesiastical borrowings on its façade rather than in its function, a piece of architectural theatre common enough in the early 1800s but rarely carried off with this much conviction or this well preserved a result.

The remodelling came in 1819, when Sir Richard Morrison was engaged to convert the original mansion into something in the fashionable gothic idiom, sometimes called the Abbey style, thought suitable for a house set deep within its own wooded demesne. Morrison gave the front a decorative panelled door with a blind fanlight, meaning the fanlight-shaped panel above the door is solid rather than glazed, set within a pointed arch and sheltered by a triple-arched porch with a flat roof. Buttresses reduce in stages up the façade to tall pinnacles, and the windows, mostly flat-headed, include some mullioned and transomed openings, the stone bars dividing the glass in a manner borrowed from genuine ecclesiastical and late medieval domestic buildings. The whole is finished in lined render with granite dressings, and roofed in natural slate with cast-iron rainwater goods, the gutters and downpipes that carried water off a roof of this scale. Large two storey wings were added later to the north and rear, extending the house considerably beyond Morrison's original scope. Internally, the plasterwork from this period survives intact, an unusual degree of preservation for a house of this age and one that has since found new life in institutional use without the alterations that so often strip such interiors of their character.