Leinster House

This guide to Leinster House in Dublin follows James Hoban, a tenant farmer's son from Kilkenny who trained as a carpenter before winning George Washington's 1792 competition to design the White House, modeling it on this very Dublin townhouse. It traces the building back to Richard Cassels and the Earl of Kildare who built it in the 1740s, and forward through its sale, its decades as home to the Royal Dublin Society, and Michael Collins requisitioning it in 1922 for a government with nowhere else to sit.