Southeast Dublin

If there's one travel poster that signifies "Dublin" more than any other, it's the one that depicts 50 or so Georgian doorways—door after colorful door, all graced with lovely fanlights upheld by columns. A building boom began in Dublin in the early 18th century as the Protestant Ascendancy constructed terraced town houses for themselves, and civic structures for their city, in the style that came to be known as Georgian, after the four successive British Georges who ruled from 1714 through 1830. The Georgian architectural rage owed much to architects such as James Gandon and Richard Castle. They and others were influenced by the great Italian Andrea Palladio (1508-80), whose Four Books of Architecture were published in the 1720s in London and helped to precipitate the revival of his style, which swept through England and its colonies. Never again would Dublin be so "smart," its visitors' book so full of aristocratic names, its Southside streets so filled with decorum and style. "Serene red and pink houses showed beautifully designed doorways, the one spot of variation in the uniformity of facade," as architectural historian James Reynolds puts it. Today, Dublin's Southside remains a veritable shop window of the Georgian style, though there are many period sights on the Northside as well (for instance, the august interiors of the Dublin Writers Museum and Belvedere College, or James Gandon's great civic structures, the Custom House and the Four Courts, found quayside).