Woodstown House, Woodstown Lower, Co. Waterford

The windows shrink storey by storey, twelve panes over eight on the ground floor narrowing to eight over eight above, an old device for making a modest house read as taller and more composed than it actually is. Add a Regency ironwork veranda, a fanlight over the front door delicate enough to survive two centuries of Irish weather, and a roofline that oversails its walls just enough to catch shadow, and the result is a house built to be looked at as much as lived in.

It went up in 1823 for Robert Shapland Carew, later first Baron Carew, and has been attributed to the Cork architect George Richard Pain, one of the brothers responsible for a good deal of the Gothic and Classical building work that reshaped Munster in the early nineteenth century. The attribution rests partly on the house's careful massing and detailing, the kind of Classical fluency, tripartite windows, dentilated cornices, reeded colonettes, that Pain brought to grander commissions elsewhere. Inside, the plasterwork has fared just as well: an acanthus-detailed ceiling rose in the drawing room, a matching one in the hall, carved timber door surrounds with anthemion ornament, and chimneypieces in white and grey marble that have stayed put through successive changes of ownership. The house passed through the Carew family, including Lady Jane Catherine Carew, who died in 1901 as Dowager Baroness of both Woodstown and Castleboro in County Wexford, and later to Edward Alphonse Winston Barron-Newell, who in the early 1900s commissioned the Dublin firm of Ashlin and Coleman to design a top-lit, galleried billiard room, a fashionable addition for a house of this standing at the time. It was sold again in 1944, stood vacant the following year, and changed hands once more in 1971. Its most unexpected tenant arrived in between: in 1967 the house was leased as a holiday home to Jacqueline Kennedy, a curious footnote for a building otherwise defined by its quiet County Waterford setting and its long association with the Carew and later Cholmeley Harrison families, the latter connected to Emo Court in County Laois.

The house still sits within its original estate arrangement, an E-shaped roof plan tucked behind the main hipped block, outbuildings and a wedge-shaped walled garden nearby, and a gate lodge marking the entrance, all of which continue to read as parts of a single, self-contained property rather than isolated survivals.