The sculptor's house.

Number twenty-two is a Dutch Billy house, a type that arrived in Dublin in the second wave of building on the Aungier Estate from the 1720s: narrower than the later Georgian terraces, four storeys over a basement, with corner chimney breasts and downstand bressummer beams. Most of them are gone. This one is not.

In the early eighteenth century it was occupied by Alderman King, one of the more capable Dublin craftsmen of the period - the brass work on the great staircase at Castletown House, added in 1759, is his. Research in the Registry of Deeds by Frederick O'Dwyer later identified another tenant of the house: John Van Nost the Younger (1713–1780), a sculptor of international standing whose statues still stand in gardens and courtyards across Ireland.

The corner fireplaces, the moulded plasterwork on the first floor, the closed-string staircase with its ramped handrail - these were the surroundings the two men lived and worked in. When we reopened the house, we chose to keep them intact rather than tidy them into modernity.

The building is a Protected Structure, RPS 301. The details it holds are not decoration. They are how the eighteenth century built a house.