The Country House

The new political confidence and economic vibrancy of the eighteenth century was most clearly expressed in the erection of great country houses. Each house was placed at the centre of a distinct, enclosed landscape unit known as a demesne. As a base of power and influence, these houses endured for two centuries, and in architectural terms shaped the landscape in their surrounding environs. The great era of building belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century, reflecting the enormity of the changing circumstances at the end of the seventeenth century, when approximately 80% of the land changed hands.

Beaulieu, Co. Louth

Beaulieu in County Louth is a large undefended house beside the Boyne estuary, built by John Curle between 1710 and 1720 for Lord Ferrard.

Image courtesy of Kevin Mulligan

Beaulieu, Co. Louth
Image courtesy of Kevin Mulligan

Beaulieu, Co. Louth

Beaulieu in County Louth is a large undefended house beside the Boyne estuary, built by John Curle between 1710 and 1720 for Lord Ferrard.

Image courtesy of Kevin Mulligan

Enlarge image

In County Kildare, Castletown House is an exceptional building erected in the early 1720s for William Connolly, whose meteoric rise to becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in Ireland reflected the opportunities in the eighteenth century for enrichment through land. The house was largely designed by Alessandro Galilei, an Italian who chose to impart in the massive three-storey front of dressed stone the character of an urban Renaissance palace. The articulation of the front, without any breaks or projection, adds to a sense of the monumental. For scale and grandeur, Castletown was barely rivalled in the period, with the exception of James Wyatt's late eighteenth-century masterpiece of Castle Coole (Fermanagh). Significantly, the spacious interiors at Castletown were completed by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, the foremost Palladian architect of the time, who had recently returned from Italy where he had seen the buildings of Palladio first hand.

The Palladian villa became an ideal for Irish patrons, just as it had been for Venetian princes of the sixteenth century. At Bellamont Forest, Pearce re-created a perfect example in the compact brick house he designed for the Earl of Bellamont near Cootehill. Designed without wings, so that it could be seen from every side in the spirit of Palladio's famous Villa Rotunda, he added a giant temple front with Doric columns, a first in Irish architecture.