Talbotstown House, Aghfarrell, Co. Wicklow

Built around 1750, its front door originally opened to the north; sometime around 1990 that arrangement was reversed, and the main entrance was shifted to the west elevation instead. The old doorway did not disappear, though. It was simply reworked into a window, its segmental arch now filled with a multiple-pane timber frame where visitors would once have stepped through.

The house is a detached, five-bay, single-storey building with an attic, laid out in a rough L-shape, the northern wing slightly longer and taller than the rest. Its walls are painted roughcast with granite dressings picked out around some of the windows, and the gable-ended roof is slated, with rendered chimneystacks and modern Velux windows let into the attic space. The new west-facing entrance is where the eighteenth century and the twentieth most obviously meet: a replacement timber door with generous sidelights and a fanlight, all framed by limestone pilasters carved with floral capitals, and topped with an entablature, a blocking course, and an urn finial. It is a formal, classically derived composition applied to what is, in structural terms, a fairly recent opening. Elsewhere the windows are mostly flat-headed timber sashes, some six-over-six, some tripartite, though the attic storey carries a few unusual triangular windows that break from that pattern. Rainwater goods have been replaced in uPVC, a small practical concession set against the older stone and render.

Set within extensive grounds, with outbuildings to the east, the house reads as a building that has been lived in and adjusted rather than preserved behind glass. The juxtaposition of Modern intervention against surviving Classical detail is not hidden or apologised for; the moved doorway, the swapped elevation, the plastic guttering against granite dressings, all sit together as evidence of a house still in use, still being altered to suit whoever occupies it, more than two and a half centuries after it was first built.