Designed in the Irish Romanesque style, with its dependence on bold, heavy carving and grotesque details, this desk was almost certainly supplied in the 1840s for the newly commissioned library at Adare. The ancestral home of the Quinn family, through his advantageous marriage to the heiress of the Dunraven Estates, Caroline Wyndham in 1810. Wyndham Quinn was able to comprehensively rebuild Adare Manor over a protracted period (1825-65). Favouring at first the Tudor Revival style of Nash's pupil James Pain, as popularised by Nash's 'Mansions of England in Olden Times', the 2nd Earl shifted to the ardent and scholarly medievalist Lewis Nochalls Cottingham (d. 1871) as architect during the 1840s. Cottingham worked closely with Thomas Willement (d. 1871), who supplied the Heraldic stained glass at Adare and also contributed to Shaw's Specimens of Ancient Furniture, 1836, and the distinct Romanesque revival style of the desk is likely to have been the result of this collaboration. Moreover, this desk is typical of the predominantly heavy carved furniture indigenous to Adare and comparable to the choir stalls in the Gallery carved by the Master Mason James Connolly and his apprentices (..."the boys are greatly improved in their bold style of carving", as the 2nd Earl stated), and it seems highly probable that this piece is from Connolly's workshops

Cottingham's eclectic style, as if incorporating from antiqeu fragments, is represented by his Snelston Hall sideboard, executed in the Elizabethan manner (see: S. Jervis, 'Gothic Rampant', The Victorian & Albert Album, No. 3, London, 1984, p. 328). While its lion-monopodium recall George Smith's desk design in Collection of Designs for Household Furniture, 1808, this desk also incorporates early Georgian features such as the gadrooned and foliate rim.