When the present owners bought Fruit Hill, County Wexford some 25 years ago, the house was a roofless shell, having been allowed to fall into dereliction for much of the last century. Long associated with the Glascott family and believed to date from the second quarter of the 18th century, the building is wonderfully idiosyncratic in appearance, from the façade’s pediment containing a Venetian window and flanked by dormer windows, to the ground floor where the fenestration was lowered on one side (the drawing room) but not the other (dining room). The gable-ended main block, its upper portion still carrying evidence of having been weather-slated, is only one room deep but extended at the rear by two wings to form a U-shaped house. The owners have not so much restored Fruit Hill as brought it back from near-death, a task few others would have been sufficiently brave to take on, since little more than the walls – and not even all of those – remained on the site. Their work here is an admirable labour of love and testimony to the fact that no building should be deemed beyond rescue.