Ardress House

Ardress House in Annaghmore near Portadown, County Armagh (Craigavon area), Northern Ireland, began as a modest two-story, five-bay brick house, built around 1660–1705 by Thomas Clarke, from a family in the vicinity of the Cope Plantation. The roof and oak staircase of the oldest part are original.

In 1760, the heiress Sarah Clarke married the Dublin architect George Ensor. From the late 1770s, he doubled the size of the house, added a classical portico to the east front, wings and curved blind walls with false windows, so that a partly false facade appeared larger than the rooms behind it. Michael Stapleton stuccoed the new salon, one of Ireland's most beautiful neoclassical interiors. The son George Ensor (1769–1843), a lawyer and political writer, added a dining room with a library above it and closed the garden front with quadrant walls and four busts of women in niches (one by Christopher Hewetson).

Charles Ensor modernized the bathrooms after 1879. Captain Charles Howard Ensor auctioned off most of the furnishings in 1959 and handed over the house to the National Trust (Ulster Land Fund) in 1960. Robert McKinstry restored it from 1962; later additions were removed. The Trust displays the house with 18th-century furniture and paintings, a paved farmyard (forge, stable, dairy, threshing barn), orchards since 1855, the Lady's Mile woodland walk, and Frizzel's Cottage, an 18th-century mud house.