Coolmore, Carrigaline, Co Cork

Bence-Jones, Mark. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London. 

p. 91. “(Newenham/IFR) A large late C18 block built 1788 by W.W. Newenham to replace a house built ca 1701 built by Thomas Newenham. Six bay entrance front; two bay breakfront; doorcase with engaged Tuscan columns and baseless pediment. Six bay garden front overlooking the Owenboy estuary. The house is faced in stucco over weather-slating, wiht stone dressings. Very large hall with late C18 or early C19 organ; two wooden staircases in separate halls on either side. Drawing rooma nd dining room on garden front, both with freizes of late C18 plasterwork. The drawing room has C19 wallpaper with delightful stencilled decorations in tempera in beautiful faced reds and greens, and painted medallions of Classical figures on a blue background. Sitting rooms on either side of the hall with rather Soanian curved ceilings. In recent years, the dining room was reduced in size in order to make a new kitchen; but the frieze was reproduced on the new partition wall and the chimneypiece moved so as to be central to the room as altered. The entrance gates are flanked by 8 lodges in the “Cottage Gothic” style, arranged in the form of an open court; they were built in 1815 by W.H. Newenham to the design of an English architect, the elder Thomas Cundy.” p. 294. [the house, which now stands empty, features in the film of Molly Keane’s book, Good Behaviour] 

The Buildings of Ireland. Cork City and County. Frank Keohane. Yale University Press: New Haven and London. 2020. 

p. 23. The first notable exponent of the Palladian style in Ireland was Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, but neither he nor his successor, Richard Castle, is known to have worked in Cork, and there are no great Palladian houses here to river Castletown, Co Kildare, or Russborough. In part this may be explained by Cork’s limited links with Dublin, so that its architecture instead held tight to a conservative Anglo-Dutch idiom well into the mid C18. The Palladian formula of a central corps de logis linked to pavilions by quadrants therefore found little favour in Cork during the early Palladian period. Exceptions include the demolished Hollyhill (near Kinsale). Garrretstown was to have had a central block but only the two-storey wings were completed. Crosshaven’s wings are free-standing. 

Instead, architects, builders and patrons made do with a simple and often tentative assimilation of Palladian elements. What did find favour was the sort of compact and economical four-square block employed by Pearce at Cashel and by Castle at the central blocks of Bellinter and Hazelwood. External refinements at such houses are confined to combinations of window and door surrounds, platbands, occasionally a cornice, and in rare cases a parapet to conceal the hipped roof. Early Georgian examples include Doneraile Court and Maryborough at Douglas; Bessborough at Blackrock (Cork city), and Crosshaven date from the mid century. Late C18 examples of these high, four-square blocks such as Coolmore (Ringaskiddy), Hoddersfield (Crosshaven) and Altamira (Liscarrol) are particularly plain, with an almost complete paring back of embellishment. 

p. 26. The other notable late C18 architect in Cork, Abraham Hargrave, appears to have been engaged by Shanahan to help complete St Patrick’s Bridge after it was damaged by a flood in 1789. Hargrave was a relative, and possibly a pupil, of the noted architect and bridge designer Thomas Harrison of Chester. He settled in Cork and developed an extensive contracting business, building barracks at Cork and Fermoy and doing much work for John Anderson at the latter town. His houses include Dunkathel and Gortigrenane, Palladian in form with wings enclosing rear yards; the four-square Hoddersfield and Coolmore; and elegant but spare villas at Vernon Mount (Douglas) and Lotabeg (Tivoli). IN Cork city, his townhouses commonly have windows set in shallow arched recesses.