Lisnabrin, Curraglass, Co Cork – courtyard Airbnb

Mark Bence-Jones. 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. 187. “A five bay bow-ended C18 house with a Diocletian window above a Venetian doorway. The seat of the Crokers, descended from a Cromwellian Colonel to whom the estate was granted. By a happy coincidence, Col Corker had been given shelter at Lisnabrin by its Irish Catholic owner, Walter Coppinger, and nursed back to health by his two daughters, having been brought here gravely wounded in a battle nearby. So instead of turning Coppinger out, Croker asked him for the hand of one of his daughters, and became his son-in-law.” 

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. 

A modest expression of Palladianism is occasionally encountered in which a simple unadorned Venetian window is placed over the doorway, as at Knockane (Castlemartyr), or on the staircase at Kilmoney Abbey (Carrigaline). At Lisnabrin (near Conna) a Diocletian window, Venetian window and Venetian doorway are stacked one above the other, although here again the openings are left unadorned in an otherwise plain façade. The centre could be given further emphasis by making it advanced and giving it a pediment, as at Carker (Doneraile), Coliney (Charleville) and Assolas (Castlemagner). A modest but charming example is Park House near Doneraile, a single-pile gable-ended house with an ashlar façade articulated by a cornice and platband, the advanced centre having moulded architraves to the pedimented doorcase, first-floor Venetian window and a Diocletian window in the pediment. At Bessborough this formula is developed further, the seven-bay three-storey façade having rusticated quoins and stepped keystones to the flanking windows. 

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

p. 27. Of mid-C18 Palladian interiors, good representative examples with panelled dados, lugged architraves, fielded panelling and chunky cornices are found at Coole Abbey House, Assolas, Cloghroe, Kilshannig, and Blackrock House. Curiously, the heavy Palladian lugged architrave remained in use in the county long after it fell out of fashion elsewhere. At Lisnabrin, Dunkathel, Burton, Rockforest and Muckridge, the form is encountered in late C18 Neoclassical interiors, suggesting an innate conservatism among local joiners. The finest joinery in most houses is reserved for the staircase, and in many cases these have survived. The best early C18 staircases, at the Red House and Annes Grove, have alternating barley-twist and columnar balusters, big Corinthian newel posts, ramped handrails and carved tread-end brackets. Mount Alvernia (Mallow), Carrigrohane and Cloghroe all have good mid-C18 staircases of a similar type; that at Lota is exceptional in its use of mahogany and for its imperial plan. Good Neoclassical staircases, geometrical in form with delicate ironwork balustrades, survive at Maryborough, Newmarket Court and Castle Hyde; the destruction of those at Vernon Mount is a particularly sad loss. 

The best early plasterwork is that of the Swiss-Italian brothers Paolo and Filippo Lafranchini at Riverstown, where highly sculptural late Baroque figurative ornament is applied to the walls and ceilings of the Saloon… Filippo alone decorated two rooms at Kilshannig, blending late Baroque figures with lighter acanthus arabesques and putti. Rococo plasterwork featuring scrolling acanthus and birds comparable to the Dublin school of the 1760s is encountered in the Saloon at Castlemartyr, and at Maryborough. At Laurentium (Doneraile) and the Old College (Youghal), it is rather more hesitant. For the most part, stucco workers remain anonymous, so it is a happy circumstance that Patrick Osborne’s accomplished work at the former Mansion House at Cork is recorded. He also probably worked at Lota, as well as at Castle Hyde. Good Neoclassical plasterwork in low relief and employing small-scale classical motifs of the type made fashionable by Robert Adam and James Wyatt is found at Maryborough, at Old Court House (Rochestown), and at the Old College and Loreto College at Youghal.