Rossenarra House

Rossenarra House is a large country house built in Rossenarra Demesne (formerly Castlehale) near the village of Kilmoganny in County Kilkenny, Ireland. It is thought to have been designed by the architect James Hoban, who was also responsible for designing the White House in Washington, D.C. The house was built around 1824-25 in a Palladian style, having been commissioned by Maurice Reade, the owner of a large estate in the Kilmoganny area. It passed through several generations of the Reade family until the 1880s when it came into the possession of the McEnery family. Sir John Lavery, an Irish artist celebrated for his portraits and related to the MacEnernys through marriage, spent the last few years of his life and died there on 10 January 1941. The house was also for a time the home of the American author Richard Condon, famous for such works as "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Prizzi's Honor". Condon lived in Rossenarra from 1971 until he returned to the US in 1980. During this time, famous guests to the house included Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra. Condon's memoir, "And Then We Moved to Rossenarra; Or The Art of Emigrating" (1973), was named in honour of his time there. The most recent residents of the house were American tycoon Walter Griffith, and his Irish-born wife Christine.