Clontra, Shankill, Co Dublin

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. 87. “A delightful Ruskinian Gothic villa, almost certainly by Sir Thomas Newenham Deane, and possibly designed by his brilliant younger partner, Benjamin Woodward. Built 1860-2 for James Lawson, a lawyer. Of two storeys, or, more precisely, a basement and an attic; the principal rooms being in the attic, which is in fact a piano-nobile, rising into a very high roof, and lit by trefoil-headed windows in the gables; Dr Girouard sees this arrangement as that of the familiar singe-storey-over-basement late-Georgian Dublin villa translated into High-Victorian Gothic. Of stone, with a certain amount of brick polychromy. Main entrance under wooden trellised veranda. Long conservatory with twisted Gothic columns of cast iron. High rooms, with sloping beamed ceilings under the roofs; the walls of the principal rooms frescoed by John Hungerford Pollen 1862, with pre-Raphaelite scenes of a knight and his lady, and The Seven Ages of Woman. Pollen also painted the spaces between the beams with birds, flowers and foliage, with backgrounds of blue and terracotta. Sold by the Lawsons earlier this century, subsequently the home of Judge Quinn.”