South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath

It is dated to around 1810, yet its small window openings and the slightly asymmetrical placement of its chimneystacks give it the air of a house built decades earlier, in the mid-eighteenth century. The plain rendered façade, five bays wide and three storeys over a basement, is lifted by a single projecting bay at its centre: a Doric porch faced in crisp ashlar limestone, its square-headed doorcase flanked by sidelights and topped with an overlight filled with cast-iron fanlight tracery. It is a restrained house that rewards a second look, one whose details do not quite match its supposed date.

The house was originally home to the Tighe family before passing to a branch of the Chapmans of Killua Castle, near Clonmellon. That connection carries an unexpected thread into twentieth-century history: T.E. Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia, was the illegitimate son of Sir Thomas Chapman, the seventh and last baronet of that line. Architecturally, the attribution is equally intriguing. Casey and Rowan, writing in 1993, recorded plasterwork inside the house attributed to the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and suggested that William Farrell, a well-regarded architect working in the early to mid-nineteenth century, may have designed the building. A full-height bow projection on the west side elevation houses the stairwell, while single-storey three-bay wings extend to east and west of the entrance front, giving the composition a settled, deliberate symmetry despite the quirks of its façade. The roof is hipped and slated, with an eaves cornice and rendered chimneystacks, and most of the window openings retain their six-over-six pane timber sliding sash windows.

South Hill has not stayed frozen as a private house. It later served as a religious institution, and today functions as a residential health care centre, a use that has brought modern extensions to the rear and to the west side of the original building. Despite this, the core Georgian structure and its atmosphere have been kept largely intact, standing within extensive grounds that still include a complex of outbuildings to the east. It is a rare thing: a country house that has changed function repeatedly across two centuries while its formal front, porch and all, remains legible as the thing it always was.