When Thomas Conolly married Lady Louisa Lennox in 1758, Castletown, County Kildare which had been built by his great-uncle William from c.1722 onwards still lacked a main staircase. The young couple undertook to address this want and within a year of their wedding seem to have employed the Swiss-born stuccadore Filippo Lafranchini to work on the plasterwork decoration. The result, as Joseph McDonnell has written, ‘evokes, like little else in the country, the spirit and grandeur of the grotesque decoration of Imperial Roman interiors…’ Yet in the midst of the grandeur one also finds domesticity, not least in the profile portraits inserted by Franchini into the stairhall walls and believed to represent members of the Conolly and Lennox families. This is especially true when one reaches the landing and encounters a pair of heads facing each other across a now-empty stucco frame. These are depictions of Tom and Louisa who together did so much to enhance the beauty of Castletown.