This book presents the first in-depth architectural study of Dublin's Victorian upper-middle-class houses. The structure plays to the book's strength – by foregrounding the author's surveys, drawings and photographs of selected terraced and semi-detached developments from Dublin's south-eastern suburbs, our understanding of this extant physical environment is greatly increased and enhanced. Building out of the author's sure touch with the materials of brick, stone, lime and timber, a world of dusty streets, granite-laden carts and Canadian lumber yards is meticulously recreated. That these houses are now occupied by Dublin's salubrious embassies and modern shiny magnates never distracts the author from her commendable focus on the house as mankind's most revealing single item of material culture. A true architectural analysis, it is but rarely diverted into the house's emotional weighting for its inhabitants. The book's five chapters move from plans to elevations, from interiors to the wider drainage, sewage and tenure issues, and from three key gentlemen entrepreneurs to the hosts of labouring men who carted and carried the bricks and stones into place.

Such houses dominated only portions of the southern Pembroke, Rathmines and Kingstown townships making the slice cut through Dublin's society and geography quite narrow. Dublin's middling sort also included the stepped hierarchy of clerical workers with large swathes of the city's suburbia, particularly in Drumcondra, Ballybough, Inchicore and Grangegorman, constructed for their benefit. This makes some of the book's claims – that Dublin's Victorian working-class housing was ‘largely swept away, or gentrified’ – a little exaggerated (p. 152). This wider jigsaw also leads to the question of the role of the ground landlord. Recent research into the Fitzwilliam and Longford de Vesci estates has revealed that ground landlords retained surprising levels of design control in pockets of their overall estate footprint. The selection of such areas was likely to be influenced by adjacency to their own abode, the potential degree of financial return and the influence of fashion (particularly for the seaside). The convenient untruth – that old estates had been silly enough to let out large areas on very long leases – has concealed their level of design control for too long. How did the Meath estate influence the layout of Rathmines and parts of Rathgar and how did such decisions trickle downwards? What was the geometrical origin of such roads as Rathgar Avenue? Which are the oldest roads and what role do key buildings play in positioning later ones? The lack of a wider viewpoint also gives the book's structure a questionable balance. As it moves from the detailed analysis of house plans to the wider landscape of drainage and sewerage, might it not have been better to do the reverse – from the large scale to the small?

The sustained focus on a few versions of the Dublin domestic formula appears at times a little unimaginative. Suggestive glimpses into aspects of Dublin's history that are not well researched – its sectarian geography, large-scale estate structure and seaside setting – lead to interesting questions that remain unexplored. Absent drawings and photographs of Victorian interiors would have revealed the difference between a chiffonier and a sideboard and their relative position in the drawing room more vividly than text. Also, what about the wallpaper? Chromatic contrast and wild patterning must sometimes have defined the spatial character more so than the architrave? Intimations that sections of Dublin's catholic middle class became more protestant than the protestants might have been borne out by a study of the wider landscape (particularly the competing placement of churches) and a more intimate study of such interiors. James Joyce's later careful representation of such interior worlds suggests that much remains to be done on the material culture of the rising middle classes of nineteenth-century Ireland.

Some of these criticisms arise from the selection of sources. Galavan is adept at reading the nuances of the house plan, developing a reasoned exposition of its variation over time and making an equally convincing analysis of its three-dimensional expression. She brings the characters and motives of three Dublin business men firmly into focus while also uncovering the imperial and family networks that enabled them to amass substantial property fortunes. Well-judged excerpts from a few novels allow her to reveal life as it was lived in these houses, although the sharp insights that correspondence, between such gentlemen and their wives, children or employees, might reveal are strangely overlooked. Yet this is perhaps the book's great strength. By not picking at the layers of lore that houses can so easily acquire we can see what they are really made of: bricks, sticks and stones arranged in a particular way for a particular time and place. This is also a history of property development and of why it has been both a way of moving up in the world and a way of expressing that ascendancy. An architectural history of a significant period in Dublin's complicated and hitherto unexplored development, this is a ground-breaking book – would that we had more of them.