Tully House, Tully, Co. Cavan

Farm outbuildings are typically functional afterthoughts, built where space allowed and altered as need dictated. Here the opposite seems true: the outbuildings echo the detailing of the main house closely enough that the whole ensemble reads as a single composition, rather than a house with sheds tacked on behind it.

The house itself dates to around 1820, a plain three-bay, two-storey block that was substantially reworked around 1880. That remodelling gave it its present character: a projecting central bay with a hipped roof and a gabled lucarne, a small window set into the slope of the roof to light an attic space, with simpler lucarnes over the outer bays. A perpendicular block was absorbed into the rear of the house at the same time, along with a lean-to and a further extension, suggesting a household expanding and rearranging itself rather than building fresh. The chimneystacks are yellow brick with clay pots, the ridge lines of the lucarnes carry decorative cresting, and the roughcast rendered walls are pierced by timber sash windows with margin lights (a Victorian fashion for framing the main pane with a border of smaller panes) on the front and side elevations. Some later uPVC replacements have crept in elsewhere, and a stained glass window looks out from the rear, but the timber panelled door with its vertical fielded panels survives at the side of the central bay, a solid, working piece of nineteenth-century joinery rather than a showpiece.

The three outbuildings that curve away behind the house share the same architectural vocabulary as the main block: slate roofs, roughcast render, half-dormer lucarne windows, and remnants of decorative bargeboarding under the eaves. Bullseye windows, small circular or oval openings often used for ventilating lofts or outbuildings, punctuate the elevations alongside more conventional square and elliptical-headed openings, and the doors are plain sheeted timber but for one range that keeps its multiple-pane glazing. A gate lodge stands at the roadside entrance to the grounds, marking the approach to a property whose farm buildings, in this case, were evidently considered worth as much design attention as the house they served.