Slaney Park House, Slaney Park, Co. Wicklow

It is a distinctly theatrical piece of design for county Wicklow, where the country houses of the late 18th and early 19th centuries tend toward plainer, more restrained facades. Rusticated render at the base gives way to smooth lined render above, and the seven-bay, two-storey elevation, with its semi-circular and flat-headed window openings fitted with two-over-two timber sashes, has the confident symmetry typical of the Regency style at its most assured. The entrance itself, a panelled timber double door set beneath a rectangular fanlight and flanked by panelled pilaster jambs, adds a further note of formality to a house clearly built to impress.

The house was built around 1810 for Richard Crosbie, a figure better known for his exploits in the air than on the ground. Crosbie was an 18th-century balloonist, part of that first generation of Irish and British aeronauts who took to hydrogen and hot-air balloons in the decades after the Montgolfier brothers' pioneering flights in France. It is a curious pairing, a man associated with ascent and spectacle settling into a house built firmly for permanence, its bowed bays and rusticated walls declaring status rather than novelty. The house has not survived entirely unaltered: a fire in 1946 led to the removal of an entire storey, a significant intervention that would have changed the proportions of the building considerably, though the Regency character of the remaining structure, with its parapet and paired bows, still asserts itself clearly. To the north, a smaller single-bay projection, part single-storey and part two-storey, suggests later or subsidiary additions to the main block. Rendered chimneystacks and cast-iron rainwater goods round out the practical details of a house that has weathered both fire and time while keeping its essential Regency silhouette intact.

Set within a small demesne, the house sits apart from the road frontage typical of many Wicklow houses of similar date, its bowed bays presumably designed to catch the light and make the most of whatever parkland setting surrounded it. There is something worth noting in the way the parapet conceals the roof entirely, a device that gives the front elevation a cleaner, more monumental appearance than the house's actual massing would otherwise suggest, especially given the loss of a storey in the 1946 fire.