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The Heylands + The Smyths + The Clementses + Ballintemple House Garvagh Londonderry

Tranquilly Perfect Calm

“It’s never been sold outside the family,” commences Chris Clements. “My cousin inherited the house which has been in the family since the 1700s and he left it to me. We asked the National Trust if they wanted it but they weren’t interested. The Garvagh Historical Society would love to have taken this place over but they couldn’t get any funding. We have a farm in Castlerock and are retiring so have decided to sell to someone who can enjoy looking after it.” Ballintemple House and its 70 hectare estate lie on the edge of the pretty village of Garvagh in the north of County Londonderry.

He shares, “The first ancestor here was my great grandfather times four Rowley Heyland. He leased it from the Bishop of Derry; in those days it was a thatched cottage. It passed to his son Arthur Rowley Heyland and then to his daughter as a dowry and she married my great great grandfather Mitchell Smyth. He was a local minister. Mitchell bought out the lease of the house and built the front Georgian block onto it in the mid to late 18th century. The house then passed to his son Arthur Clements Smyth. He was a Major in the Marines and travelled all over the world.”

“When Arthur was getting old,” Chris continues, “his four daughters had married and his son had emigrated to Canada. My great great grandmother had died so he was on his own. In 1920 he sold Ballintemple to his first cousin Dominick Heyland. So it went from Heyland to Smyth and then back to Heyland again. He left it to his daughter who then left it to my cousin Hugh and that’s how I got it. It’s really a large farmhouse; every generation has bolted on a bit which makes it interesting.”

He adds, “When Dominick Heyland took it on he married a lady called Clara Tilling who was the daughter of Thomas Tilling who owned the London Transport Company. Thomas started the first horse drawn trams in London. At one stage there were 5,000 horses on the go and she pumped money into the place. They built a dairy and bottled their milk here and supplied it locally. They had pedigree pigs too. He died quite young. When the house was being sold by Arthur Clements Smyth all the sisters got various pieces. My grandmother got quite a bit of the furniture which we brought back with us.”As a result, Ballintemple House is a period piece. Time has not stood still though: few houses can boast of an early Georgian drawing room; late Georgian library; Victorianised dining room; bedrooms with early 20th century chimneypieces; and a late 20th century conservatory. Period pieces. Externally, grey walls (stone, roughcast render and pebbledash), grey slated roofs, and green painted window frames and doors visually bind together the various stages of its architectural evolution.A daffodil lined sweep of avenue weaving through woodland bordering a meadow leads to the east facing entrance front. Behold! This is the quintessential Georgian country house. If Sir Charles Brett had lived long enough to write a Buildings of County Londonderry edition, he would have categorised Ballintemple at the upper end of the Middling Sized Houses not quite making Grand Houses, with true Charlie panache and humour. The slight irregularity of the five bays of the later main block hints that this part was stitched into the fabric of an older building. More anon. The yard facing rear elevation is more informal with varying heights and projections. Windows range from two pane casements to two pane sashes to four horizontal pane sashes to a 24 pane sash.The most extraordinary architectural feature of Ballintemple House is its doorcase. Dublin is famous for its Georgian doorcases; rural Ireland, not so much. This country cousin is just as elaborate as anything being photographed by a dozen tourists on Merrion Square. Rather than an urban semicircular fanlight, a gentler elliptical headed fanlight stretches over the original wide timber door with its beaded muntin, four vertical panels and cast iron furniture flanked by panelled jambs and margin paned sidelights. Another departure is instead of the typical Dublin half umbrella spoke glazing bars, Ballintemple’s fanlight is vertically divided. The doorcase was recently fully restored with support from the Irish Georgian Society.

The conservatory overlooks an intimate side garden dominated by a pair of vast cast iron urns. No doubt salvaged from a country house? “My cousin bought them from Kelly’s auction of contents!” says Chris. People of a certain vintage will recall Kelly’s in Portrush, County Antrim, had a rather well known nightclub called Lush. These days, middle aged clubbers can enjoy a slightly more chilled experience at Lush Classical, an annual summer event held in Belfast combining trance DJs and the Ulster Orchestra. Techno strings.The library and dining room open off the powder blue entrance hall. The creamy wallpapered dining room captures the essence of the house’s evolution in one shot: 12 pane Georgian windows, acanthus leaf Victorian plasterwork and a very Art Deco timber chimneypiece. The outline of a doorway shows there was once an enfilade running along the front of the house. A portrait of a dashing military gentleman is in the burgundy library. The subject is Major Arthur Rowley Heyland and he was painted by Chris’s talented wife Chrissy. She based it on a miniature painted in Toulouse after the Battle of the Pyrenees, the only known picture of the war hero. On 17 June 1815, the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, the 34 year old Major wrote to his wife,

“My dear Mary. What I recommend my love in case I fall in the ensuing contest, is that my sons may be educated at the Military College, except Arthur, who is hardly strong enough: the hazards of a military life are considerable, but still it has its pleasures, and it appears to me of no consequence whether a man dies young or old, provided he be employed in fulfilling the duties of the situation he is placed in this world.”“I would wish my son John, whose early disposition has made us both happy, should serve in the Infantry till he is a Lieutenant, and then by money or interest be removed to a Regiment of Light Cavalry. I trust his gentlemanly manner and his gallantry in the field will make his life agreeable. Kyffin might try the Artillery Service and make it an object to be appointed to the Horse Artillery, which he can only hope for by applying himself to the duties of his profession. Alfred must get in a Regiment of Infantry, the 95th for instance, and my young unborn must be guided by his brother John and by your wishes.”

“For yourself, my dearest, kindest Mary, take up your residence in Wales, or elsewhere if you prefer it, but I would advise you, my love, to choose a permanent residence. My daughters, may they cling to their mother and remember her in every particular. My Mary, let the recollection console you that the happiest days of my life have been with your love and affection, and that I die loving only you, and with a fervent hope that our souls may be reunited hereafter and part no more.”“What dear children, my Mary, I leave you. My Marianna, gentlest girl, may God bless you. My Anne, my John, may heaven protect you. My children may you all be happy and may the reflection that your father never in his life swerved from the truth and always acted from the dictates of his conscience, preserve you, virtuous and happy, for without virtue there can be no happiness.”

“My darling Mary I must tell you again how tranquilly I shall die, should it be my fate to fall; we cannot, my own love, die together; one or other must witness the loss of what we love most. Let my children console you, my love, my Mary. My affairs will soon improve and you will have a competency, do not let too refined scruples prevent you taking the usual government allowance for officers’ children and widows. The only regret I shall have in quitting this world will arise from the sorrow it will cause you and your children and my dear Marianne Symes. My mother will feel the loss yet she possesses a kind of resignation to these inevitable events which will soon reconcile her.”“I have no desponding ideas on entering the field, but I cannot help thinking it almost impossible I should escape either wounds or death. My love, I cannot improve the will I have made, everything is left at your disposal. When you can get a sum exceeding £10,000 for my Irish property, I should recommend you to part with it and invest the money, £6,000 at least, in the funds, and the rest in such security as may be unexceptionable. You must tell my dear brother that I expect he will guard and protect you, and I trust he will return safe to his home.”

The following day, Mary Heyland was widowed.

“That gentleman was my great great great grandfather,” Chris explains. “Arthur was very much an action man. He was born in Belfast and joined the army, becoming a Major of the 40th Regiment. He was court marshalled because one of his senior officers hit one of the soldiers. He was put on a charge for the offence which was pretty unheard of: you did not put a commanding officer on a charge. It was upheld though and he was put on half pay. But he rejoined the army when he heard Napoléon escaped from Elba Island. At Waterloo he had his hat shot then his horse shot from underneath him. His sword was then shattered and on the fourth go he was killed. Arthur was buried out on the battlefield. He died young.”Major Arthur Rowley Heyland’s son Kyffin obeyed his father’s last wish and attended Sandhurst Military College before becoming a Captain in the 25th Regiment. Kyffin moved to British Guyana in 1831 to serve as a magistrate. He settled with his wife Ann and their three children in Georgetown, the capital of the colony. A family history reports, “Another child was on the way when Kyffin took ill. He was taken to Barbados where the climate was considered much healthier. There, Kyffin died the day before his 35th birthday.” Kyffin’s pregnant widow Ann wrote from Georgetown to her widowed mother-in-law Mary on 31 May 1843,“My dear Mama. I hope you will in this time of deep affliction allow me to address you. I have today received your letter to Kyffin in answer to the one of mine saying a favourable change had taken place. I dread, indeed am certain, that the intelligence of his departure from this world will reach you before one I wrote on 19 or 20 March to Kyffin’s sister Ann telling her of the rapid change that had taken place for the worse.”

“My dearest, beloved husband! It was in God’s appointed time. Oh, the perfect calm that reigned in his final withdrawal of his thoughts from this world and a firm hope in our Saviour, would have been his. As it is he always appears in my remembrance in this state of happiness and we have reason to hope that he is now and forever happy. To tell you that I feel desolate and that each day increases the knowledge of my loss of kind, cheerful affection and solicitude and to remind me more fully of my bereavement is sating little, but I bow with submission to the will of Him who thought it right to afflict me.”

There is an extraordinary looking brass lock on the entrance door with an equally extraordinary provenance. “Major Arthur Rowley Heyland’s son Alfred Heyland also joined the army and fought at Crimea He lost his arm and was nursed back to health in Florence Nightingale’s hospital,” notes Chris. “Engraved on the lock is, ‘Taken From The Hospital at Sebastopol Lieutenant Colonel Heyland 95th Regiment 8 September 1855’. Everyone has visions of the one armed gentleman leaving the hospital with this lock under his good arm!”Leading off the library, the deep green drawing room has a pair of tall windows gracefully skirting the floor. A sketch of Castleroe Castle hangs on the wall. The family history states, “Dominick Heyland came to Londonderry from England in 1611, either as a settler or with a garrison. The old castle of Castleroe was built in the 14th century. Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, was wed and spent his honeymoon there in the time of Elizabeth I. It was replaced by a fine new Plantation castle, also called Castleroe, 45 feet long with stone walls 32 inches think. The castle stood on a commanding eminence above the Bann River. The Heylands continued to occupy Castleroe until Rowley Heyland demolished it in 1767, so the story goes, to economise on the window tax. The family lived at Gortnamoyah for a while, then Rowley rented and later bought a Plantation style house in Garvagh. Ballintemple has been home to the Heylands to this very day. It had been built originally in the early 17th century and was later added onto several times.”Another picture in the drawing room is the earliest extant illustration of Ballintemple House. This watercolour clearly shows the bowed wing which contains the current drawing room. Attached to the bow is a single storey block where the main house now stands. The single storey block has a doorcase not dissimilar to the current one. Could it have been salvaged from the earlier house? The bow wing is not an addition to the main house as the Listing suggests. It predates the main house.The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Parishes of County Londonderry, 1830 to 1840, provide a description of Ballintemple: “The cottage is partly half circle, thatched and stands one storey. There is a large range of the dwelling attached to the back part of the cottage. It is also thatched and stands partly two storeys. There is a good fruit and vegetable garden enclosed by a quickset hedge. The demesne consists of about 30 acres and well enclosed with quickset hedges and iron gates. The demesne is also improved by plantations of various kinds of forest trees. The cottage stands on an eminence over a large glen and river and commands a delightful prospect of the neighbouring hills.”

Heading back into the depth of the house beyond the entrance hall, Chris concludes, “We call this the Corridor to Nowhere! This passageway used to lead into more rooms but in the 1970s a wing was demolished.” A kitchen and a pantry and lots of other nooks and crannies fill the back of the house. The seaweed green staircase hall in the centre of this 560 square metre house is the most Victorian interior. A tall arch headed stained glass window, internal peephole windows, roof glazing, tongue and groove panelling, encaustic floor tiles, rifles and taxidermy create a baronial appearance. A travel trunk with Earl of Leitrim stamped on it is a reminder of an aristocratic family connection. A very early electrics board attached to the landing wall shows how previous owners kept up with modern technology. Four bright and airy bedrooms – three with floor touching windows, all with head space entering the eaves – are spread across the first floor. Two further bedrooms, one originally for three servants, are on mezzanine levels.

A new chapter awaits the beautiful and unique Ballintemple House.

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Architects Architecture Country Houses Design Developers People Town Houses

Charlton House Charlton London +

Red Not Dead

The mid 20th century County Down housebuilder Joseph Gribben always advocated building in brick, especially the rustic textured variety, and recommended constructing tall chimneys that would allow smoke to blow above the roof ridge. He would appreciate Charlton in south London. High on a hill, the principal buildings circling the summit are all red brick and there are plenty of tall chimneys. Bridget Cherry and Nicholas Pevsner record in their Guide to South London Buildings (1983), “The old centre of the meeting of Charlton Road and Charlton Church Lane is small, and still has some village character, although it is surrounded by later 19th century and 20th century housing on all sides. Apart from the 17th century Church of St Luke, and Charlton House and its outbuildings, no buildings visibly of before the 19th century remain in the village centre although the attractively stuccoed Bugle Horn Inn is of late 17th century origin.”

Ah Charlton House, a miraculous half a millennium survival. It’s even still positioned in a parkland setting. Bridget and Nicholas describe its origins: “Built by Sir Adam Newton, tutor to Henry Prince of Wales, circa 1607 to 1612. Later owners were Sir William Ducie, who made repairs in 1659, Sir William Langhorne, East India merchant, after 1680, and in the 19th century the Maryon-Wilson family, for whom Norman Shaw restored the house and made minor additions in 1877 to 1878. Acquired by the Borough in 1925. Charlton House is the only Jacobean mansion of the first order remaining in the precincts of London. The plan is E shaped with four symmetrical bay windows at the ends of the four wings and two towers in the centres of the two wings, framing the building when seen from the west of east. The building is of three storeys above capacious cellars, built of red brick with pierced open tracery. The towers have ogee roofs. It is of plain and angular, spacious but not at all luxurious, with the exception of the west frontispiece, that is, the door surround and the bay window above which suddenly breaks out into the most exuberant and undisciplined ornament – the work of a mason probably who possessed a copy of Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura of 1593 and a rare case of close imitation.”

And then the writing duo go inside, “The most remarkable feature of the interior is the position of the Hall, just as revolutionary (though not unique in Jacobean architecture) as Inigo Jones’s at the Queen’s House. it is two storeyed, placed at right angles to the front and back, and runs right across the building. Above it on the second floor in the Saloon reached by an elaborately carved staircase, quadrangular with a square open well and the flights of stairs supported by posts which between ground floor and first floor form palm branches in cases. The sloping pilaster balusters progress through the three orders from ground floor to top landing. The plasterwork is Victorian. The saloon has an original plaster ceiling with pendants and a marble fireplace with restrained architectural ornament to the overmantel above finely carved figures of Venus and Vulcan. This is very much in the manner of Nicholas Stone. In the bay window is circa 17th century heraldic glass with the Ducie arms. on the same floor the north wing is taken up entirely by the long gallery, also with a good plaster ceiling. The original panelling has gone except for pilasters by the windows. In these, more heraldic glass with the Ducie arms. The gallery is reached from the saloon by the white drawing room whose stone fireplace with two tiers of caryatids, three dimensional strapwork, and relief scenes makes the marble one in the saloon appear very classical.”

Finally, back to the great outdoors again, “Of outbuildings the stable to the south are contemporaneous with the house, now arranged on two sides of a quadrangle. Remanagements [sic] under Sir William Langhorne are easily discernible. In front of the entrance on the lawn a solitary gateway, plastered, with Corinthian columns and an 18th century cresting. To the northwest of the house, a handsome summerhouse of circa 1630, brick, square, with Tuscan pilasters, and a concave roof. There is no documentary confirmation of the traditional attribution to Inigo Jones, but the complete absence of Jacobean frills at evidently such an early date makes it quite justifiable. Nicholas Stone would also be a possibility.” The ski slope roofed Grade I summerhouse or lodge, a pepper pot pavilion, is now a public convenience (or rather inconvenience – it’s shut).

Armed with the wealth of knowledge Pevsner Guides are so adept at summarising, a decade ago Aimée Felton, Associate at leading architectural conservation practice Donald Insall Associates, led an Irish Georgian Society tour of Charlton House. Here are the highlights. Over to Aimee, “The lodge is widely attributed to Inigo Jones. Of course it is – he did most of Greenwich! Someone once attributed the lodge to him and it stuck.” She is undertaking a conditions survey as part of a long term masterplan of the house and estate. “A variety of historic fabric is remaining. Some in my opinion was later heavily edited by the various occupants. And heavily rebuilt following bomb damage.” This is most obvious in the north wing where the original imperial red brick and whitish grey stone have been patched up with metric red brick and yellow stone. These mid 20th century repairs included placing the sundial upside down.

“It’s the best Jacobean house in London and is of pivotal importance to its era,” Aimée declares. “It displays a full modern appreciation of flow and sequence of rooms. An H plan was so innovative. There are lots of Jacobean Houses of E plan and E without a tail, but not so many H. Charlton is first in its class: to walk in through the front door and see its garden beyond. The axis though the building is what makes it so special. The Kitchen was always on the north side of Jacobean houses to cool dairy produce and meat, with bedrooms above as heat rises. But this house is laid out to take in the views to the north towards the river and to the west to the King in Greenwich. This is a really bold statement and the only Jacobean house with a north facing gallery.”

The first floor Long Gallery stretches the full length of the north elevation. Like much of the house, the Long Gallery is an architectural puzzle. Aimée highlights, “The floor and ceiling are original but the panelling isn’t. Charlton has some of the best fireplaces of the Jacobean era. The Long Gallery marble and slate one is odd but exquisite.” No architect is recorded. “There is incredibly scarce information both on the Jacobean era and Charlton. You’ll notice I say ‘attributed to’ and ‘we suspect that …’ a lot!” At least there’s a keystone dated 1607 on the main block and one dated 1877 on the wing and the staircase is engraved 1612.

Sir Spencer Maryon-Wilson sold the house to Greenwich Council and auctioned the contents in 1920. The house has been used ever since by various community bodies. A public library is now in the former ground floor Dining Room and Chapel and a café occupies the Hall. Donald Insall Associates are tasked with applying a holistic approach to its fabric and future use or uses. Furnishing rooms in the original period like a National Trust house is not an option. “There simply isn’t enough Jacobean furniture,” she says. “Even the V and A wouldn’t have enough and any pieces it has are so special they’re kept in glass cases.”

There’s plenty of pictorial evidence of how the rooms were furnished in the latter Maryon-Wilson years. Aimée smiles, “If you can’t find a decent photo of a country house look in Country Life because someone is always bragging about their home!” Charlton House is no exception. Monochromatic images of the early 1900s show the interior chockablock with traditional brown furniture and taxidermy and tapestries. This eclecticism is reflected in later plasterwork. She points out the ceiling in the Prince Henry Room which isn’t original. “The cornice is beyond wrong! As offensive as the ceiling is, it’s a nice ceiling, but one that’s just not for this house. Just because it’s not right though doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be preserved to show history. Everyone has their oddities and we just move on.” Much more in keeping with the original architecture is the 1877 extension to the south, now a wedding venue. Unsurprising as Bridget and Nicholas record it was designed by that great historically aware Arts and Crafts architect Norman Shaw. Aimée sums up the extension as, “Jacobean with a Shaw twist.”

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Architects Architecture Country Houses People

Dromana House + Gateway Cappoquin Waterford

Two Hours in Aragon

Quite the holiday destination, Blackwater River Valley is a dreamscape of country houses and their demesnes. A celebrated 20th century novelist was a frequent guest at one of these heritage delights, Dromana House, where she became well known for her penchant for gossip and awareness of social standing. The editor of the novelist’s later books, Diana Athill of André Deutsch, heaped praise on her in a 2017 recording: “Molly Keane was so remarkable because she was so lovely and charming and so nice. It was very odd she became a writer because she came from a completely Irish gentry background. She always insisted that she started writing purely because she had to make some sort of money to buy dance dresses and go to parties.”

“She had to write under a pseudonym because if young men had known she wrote books they would have thought she was brainy and that was thought to be the most awful thing. Her first nine books were written under that name so that no one would know. You think she can’t just have written them coldly to make money. She must have been enjoying writing because they are so good. Of course her darling first husband died young and quite unexpectedly. She was absolutely broken by that and she had to somehow cope with bringing up her two children along and managing as best she could.”

“The thing about Molly was she was so completely not conceited about her writing and she did in a way know she wrote well but she didn’t think that important. She was very charming – many people who are charming become corrupted by their own charm. You can’t help knowing it if you are a great charmer and so you exploit your charm. I’ve met charming people who are quite chilling to know because in a way it’s automatic with them to turn it on. Molly could turn it on if she wanted to. I’ve seen her to do it if she was wanting to get through an interview or something. But on the whole she was the most charming person I know who didn’t ever exploit it.”

Barbara Grubb née Villier-Stuart’s parents left Dromana House after most of the estate was acquired by the Irish Land Commission in 1957. In their absence, the residing cousin demolished the “new house” as Barbara’s husband Nicholas calls the later wing. “It’s a good view isn’t it?” asks Barbara with some understatement standing on the balcony accessed through French doors in the drawing room of the remaining house. “That’s Lismore over there – you can see the Catholic cathedral and to the right of it the Protestant cathedral. It’s such a good vantage point here.”

“And then you’re looking further to the right at the Knockmealdown Mountains and two of the main Blackwater Valley houses: Tourin House owned by the Jameson family of whiskey fame and then up the hill you’ve got Cappoquin House where the Keane family lives. Sir Charles Keane gave a presentation here last night on his three times great grandfather Lieutenant General John Keane, Lord Keane of Kandahar.”

“So here we are on the Blackwater, probably one of the widest stretches of the river. As you all know it sources in Kerry and goes 12 miles south of here into the bay in Youghal. There’s a four metre tide so it’s quite a serious one. We have salmon rights here which go back to 1215 to King John. Needless to say there are hardly any salmon left so very little fishing is done. In around 1905 there was just short of a quarter of a million salmon caught in the river which is a massive amount of fish! Now the annual quota is about 2,000. Just shows you what us humans have done.”

“There was supposedly a castle here burnt in 1200. We know nothing of it really. We then know about this towerhouse that was fought over in the 1640 rebellion that left it in a ruinous state. And then after that the family built a Jacobean low house lying east to west. In the 1700s they built on the Georgian block. The garden balustrade is the bow of what was the ballroom. That one room was 22 yards side to side which wasn’t small.”

The “new house” was erected in front of the older building in the 1780s by George Mason-Villiers, 2nd Earl Grandison, and remodelled by Henry Villiers-Stuart, 1st and last Lord Stuart de Decies, to a design by the architect Martin Day in the 1820s. It had a substantial nine bay two storey façade. All 17 windows on this elevation had raised stone surrounds; the eight ground floor window surrounds are surmounted by triangular pediments. The central entrance door (flanked by paired Doric columns and topped by a semicircular fanlight) was set in a larger triangular pedimented surround. Martin Day is mainly known for his severe neoclassical buildings in Counties Waterford and Wexford.

Demolition of the Georgian exposed the 1960s L shaped rear range of the inner courtyard. It was tidied up to achieve a pleasant harled manor house appearance with a cut limestone Gibbsian doorcase. Looks deceive: this is the Jacobean house incorporating the base of the medieval tower. Barbara and Nicholas returned in 1995 and ever since have worked on restoring the house and grounds. “The Georgian building was so vast if it hadn’t been demolished Dromana House would have been sold and would now be a hotel,” warns Barbara. Picturesque ruins of a 1751 banqueting house provide a shoreside folly. Azaleas, camelias, hydrangeas, magnolias and rhododendrons add colour and shape to 12 hectares of woodland gardens.

Barbara is the incredibly dashing 26th generation of the family to occupy the estate over the last eight centuries. Females feature prominently in her genealogy. A painting of her equally glamorous predecessor Lady Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, favoured mistress of Charles II, hangs in the drawing room. Another ancestral portrait is of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. “He had one of the shortest terms as a Prime Minister of Great Britain,” she ruefully remarks, “although that was until Liz Truss came along.” In 1826, the Irish Nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell visited the enlarged Dromana House as a guest of then owner Lord Henry Mount Stuart.

“Dromana House was the inspiration for the house in Molly Keane’s Two Nights in Aragon,” Barbara shares. Published in 1941, this was her ninth novel and the fate that befalls one of its protagonists, Nan O’Neill, is quite simply the most tragicomic in Anglo Irish literature. “Aragon stood high above a tidal river. So high and so near that there was only a narrow kind of garden between house and water … Directly underneath the house and this grove, the river swelled and shrank with the tides.” Sounds familiar? Barbara confirms that Dromana, like Aragon, is haunted. There’s holiday accommodation in one part of the house: a private reciprocal. Molly Keane lived for a while in Belleville, a country house upstream from Dromana closer to Cappoquin.

“Villierstown is named after the major landowning family of Villiers who founded a linen industry here about 1750,” writes James Hyde in The Super Seven Towns and Villages of West Waterford (2024). “Built to exploit flax growing, Villierstown was a perfect spot: broad fields, easy access to river transport and a large population to work as weavers.” This enterprise was established in response to a weather induced famine of 1739: homes were built for linen workers from Belfast and around 60,000 trees were planted. The village is 2.6 kilometres south of Dromana.

Now disconnected from the grounds of Dromana House stands arguably Ireland’s most extraordinary and certainly most charming gateway. “An Irish Georgian Society (US) Grant,” records Stuart Blakley in the Irish Georgian Society Bulletin (2023), “was awarded to the Indian Gateway of Dromana Estate for a conservation report. This archway flanked by lodges was designed by local architect Martin Day in whimsical mood in the early 19th century. Its Hindu Gothic idiom brings a little bit of Brighton Pavilion to County Waterford.” A public road runs through the arch and over the Finisk River bridge behind it adding to its precarious condition. All minarets and ogee arches, this silvery sandstone structure replaced a timber version built to welcome home newlyweds Henry Villiers Stuart and Theresia Pauline Ott. Their honeymoon location? Brighton, of course. Quite the holiday souvenir.

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Design

Lindy Guinness Marchioness of Dufferin + Ava + Abbey Leix Laois

Holland Days Source

Neither a Monday evening nor (apropos to an Irish shindig) drizzly weather could possibly dampen spirits. Not when it’s a party co hosted by the dashing Sir David Davies and the lively Lindy Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, last Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. Her Ladyship is the artist known as Lindy Guinness. The setting is another draw: the mid Victorian splendour of Lindy’s Kensington city mansion (townhouse being too humble a term).

Banker and businessman Sir David is President of the Irish Georgian Society. In between rescuing companies and country houses, he leads a high profile social life, counting Christina Onassis among his exes. Like all the greats, he once worked at MEPC. This party is a book launch celebrating the publication about his primary Irish estate, Abbey Leix in County Laois. Averys Champagne is served with prawns and pea purée on silver spoons. There’s a metaphor lurking in that cutlery.

Two vast full depth bay windowed reception rooms on the piano nobile of the Marchioness’s five storey house easily accommodate the 100 guests. One room is hung with her paintings. Renowned fine art specialist Charles Plante is an admirer: “Lindy Guinness brings forth abstraction in painting that mirrors the Cubism of Cézanne and Picasso. Her works are irresistible.” The staircase walls are lined with David Hockney drawings. In fact there’s 20th century art everywhere. Lucien Freud was Lindy’s brother-in-law and old chums included Francis Bacon and Duncan Grant.

This party’s getting going. Everyone one should know is here. Interior decorator Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill is admiring the garden. Sir David’s glamorous sister Christine and her son Steffan are chatting in the entrance hall. They’re from Ballybla near Ashford, County Wicklow. Turns out they’re big fans of nearby Hunter’s Hotel. Writer Robert O’Byrne is conversing with designer and collector Alec Cobbe in the drawing room. “I still live in Newbridge House when I’m in Ireland,” confirms Alec. Broadcaster Sean Rafferty is busy playing down his former illustrious career in Northern Ireland where he’s still a household name. “You must visit my cottage in Donegal.” A party isn’t a party without interior decorator extraordinaire Nicky Haslam. “I didn’t realise I was such a style icon to you young guys!”

Fresh off the treadmill finishing the definitive guide to Russborough in County Wicklow, a mighty tome on another Irish country house, Abbey Leix was erudite architectural historian William Laffan’s next commission. Sir David bought the estate from the 1st Earl Snowdon’s nephew, 7th Viscount de Vesci, for £3 million in 1995. William’s book celebrates the restoration of the house and the rejuvenation of its 485 hectare estate.

“Thank you to Lindy for inviting us to her home,” Sir David announces. “It’s very much a home not a museum. Someone asked me earlier was this my house. I wish it was! The only thing better than a double 1st is a double Guinness! Lindy is a Guinness by birth and a Guinness by marriage. And thank you to William for all the hard work. I asked him to write 100 pages and three years later he’s written hundreds of pages! The photographs are beautiful but do make sure you all read a bit of William’s great text too!”

The Knight of Glin’s widow Madam Olda FitzGerald, mother-in-law of the actor Dominic West, appears. Sir David nods, “Desmond FitzGerald was a great inspiration to me. Bless him, bless the Irish Georgian Society. I feel very honoured to follow in his footsteps as President. There are three other people I wish to thank without whom the restoration of Abbey Leix wouldn’t have been possible. John O’Connell, the greatest conservation architect in Ireland. Val Dillon, the leading light of the antiques trade. John Anderson, former Head Gardener of Mount Usher Gardens and Keeper of the Gardens of Windsor Great Park. I had to prise him away from the Royals!”

“Bravo!” toasts the Marchioness. Her blue eyes twinkling, her jaunty scarf knotted as tightly as the curls of her silvery hair, Lindy chats about her other property, the very private Clandeboye, a late Georgian country house on an 800 hectare estate in County Down. She’s especially proud of her yoghurt production on the estate. “My mother-in-law gallantly rescued Clandeboye from debt and brought in the flamboyant designer Felix Harbord to do up the house in the 1950s. He designed the American Plantation style porte cochère with its four white Doric columns. The blank entrance wall of the 1st Marquess’s remodelling must have previously given such a drab first impression of the house. Felix also decorated Luttrellstown Castle, my aunt’s house near Dublin. Clandeboye is a house of dreams and enchantment that fills my thoughts and – now as I am older – the pleasure of being part of it grows greater.”

Lindy keeps talking, “I can remember arriving for the first time in 1962 and walking up the 1st Marquess’s halls in blurred amazement. I was a youthful debutante and had come to stay for a Clandeboye weekend. This first summer visit passed in days of happy exploration. We had arrived late in the evening when all was dark. I remember waking the following morning and looking out from my bedroom called Rome to see a magnificent interlocking landscape of greens that led down to a lake. It was especially beautiful – there were low horizontal bands of Irish mist allowing only certain parts of the landscape to be sharply defined. Oh you’ve got me reminiscing!” The Averys Champagne flows.

That was 2017. Where are the main players now? Just three years after this party, the hostess who was born Serena Belinda Rosemary Guinness died aged 79. The marquessate defunct, Sir John Blackwood, 5th Baron Dufferin, a descendent of her husband’s family, was upgraded to take over Clandeboye and 4 Holland Villas Road. Sir David Davies sold Abbey Leix in 2021 and his main base is Killoughter House near Ashford, County Wicklow. John O’Connell acted as architect for its restoration. Charles Plante is now recognised as an international tastemaker. In 2025 Robert O’Byrne published The Irish Country House A New Vision. Featured piles of the Emerald Isle include Killoughter House and Moyglare Manor, a former hotel near Maynooth in County Kildare. Madam Olda FitzGerald continues to add sparkle to high society events, not least Alfred Cochrane’s legendary 2024 summer garden party at Corke Lodge in County Wicklow. “A party is only as fabulous as its guests!” quipped Ireland’s most stylish host. William Laffan’s book on Abbey Leix became an instant collector’s item and is currently valued at over eight times its original price of £40.

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The Durdin Robertsons + Huntington Castle Clonegal Carlow

Carlow Sweet Chariot

Every view of this multifaceted castle unveils a different vein. The gunpowder grey entrance front: rectilinear massing and rhythmic rows of windows. The steel grey driveway approach: 12th century abbey ruins and pointy dormers betwixt turrets. The bleached white courtyard: a picturesque jumble of crowstepped gables and battlemented bow windows. The sunburnt terracotta garden front: pillared arches and Stygian loggias swinging low under cantilevered boxy glasshouses.

Ever since 1826, when early adopter Joseph Nicéphore Niépce fixed the image of his family courtyard in Gras on a bitumen glass plate, architecture and photography have been fond bedfellows. This is despite one being about static volumes and the other decisive moments. Yet is Huntington Castle beyond expression in a hackneyed Hockneyed happening holistic Polaroid collage, provenance and ambiance rarely surviving the transition from three dimensions to two? Ancestors of the Durdin Robertsons include Lord Rosse founder of the Hellfire Club, flame haired Grace O’Malley Pirate Queen of Connaught, and, a little further back, Noah’s niece Sheila Benson. Notable visitors darkening its doors over the years have included Lavender’s Blue, William Butler Yeats, Mick Jagger and Hugh Grant in order of descending decadence. But even more notably, the Durdin Robertsons are still very much in residence.

The same cannot be said, it seems, for just about every other country house in Ireland. Heritage is crumbling. No one’s picnicking, foreign or indigenous, everyone’s panicking in this land. One person who knows all too well is chartered building surveyor and architectural historian Frank Keohane. He was tasked with compiling Buildings of Cork, 2020, the Irish version of a Pevsner guide. “I’ve a sneaking suspicion that more books are sold on ruins than intact country houses,” Frank ruminates. “Take the semi derelict Loftus Hall which is really exposed near a cliff on the Wexford coast. The owner does ghost tours – the devil comes for dinner, and so on. But you need to be practical, ok? Ruins may photograph well but sooner or later if left they disappear. I hope it’s a section in Loftus Hall’s history and not the final chapter.”

Frank observed in 2014, “Out of the 545 entries in Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland, 18 have been ‘restored’. But I use the term loosely. Dunboy Castle, immortalised by Daphne du Maurier in Hungry Hill, was to be converted into a six star hotel. Horrific extensions were added though! Lough Eske would have collapsed if it hadn’t been rebuilt and converted into a hotel but it’s a bit trim and prim for me. Kilronan Castle has been loosely restored with an extension in a pseudo style of what I don’t know. The shell of Killeen Castle has been restored but lies empty surrounded by a golf course. Dromore Castle, of international importance, still in ruins. Bellamont Forest, Carriglas, Hazelwood, Whitfield Court, the contents of Bantry House … all at risk. At least at Killua Castle the family has started by restoring and moving into the wing.” He highlighted that Monkstown Castle has fortunately been saved by Cork County Council.

Huntington Castle is now home to the dashing Alexander Durdin Robertson, former Irish Guard, his beautiful artist wife Clare and their sons Herbert and Caspar, following a sojourn off Northcote Road in London’s wildly fashionable Battersea. Alex’s mother lives in the coachman’s cottage in the courtyard. Built as a garrison in the 1620s and extended right up to the 1920s, it was converted to a home in 1673 by the first and last Lord Esmonde, passing by marriage into the descendants of the current incumbents. Restored 17th century terraced formal Italian gardens, rectangles of lawn and a circular pond, darkly orchidaceous in this majestic last December, wrap around the castle like ghostly folds of a billowing crinoline dress.

A 600 year old silent avenue of tall French lime trees connects the castle to Clonegal. The village guards a pass through the Blackstairs Mountains where Counties Carlow, Wexford and Wicklow collide. “Mandoran,” as Lady Olivia Durdin Robertson would say. “County Westcommon,” as Molly Keane would call it. Clonegal is cute as a cupcake – a river runs through it – lined with pretty Georgian terraces. The only discordant note is a smattering of uPVC framed windows, the plastic scourge of heritage.

Alex’s great grandfather was the last architect to alter the building, making minor changes and erecting concrete framed glass houses in the kitchen garden. Manning Robertson was not just a mere architect but a town planner and writer. The original influencer. He produced plans for the cities of Dublin, Cork and Limerick as well as Dun Laoghaire, hellbent on introducing the concept of welfare homes, when the profession was in its infancy. The journey from modern to modernism to modernity had begun.

Town planning mightn’t be the sexiest of subjects but his seminal 1924 book Everyday Architecture, as well as being aeons ahead of its time, is a riot, full of titillating tips and illuminating ruminations. “Unfortunately uneducated taste is nearly always bad.” Or, “The glazing of a well proportioned window is divided into vertical panes; one horizontal window might be tolerated in a village, just as no village is complete without its idiot, but the whimsical should never usurp the place of the normal.” Unexpected chapter headings shout “Slippery Jane”, “On Lies and Evasions” and “Smoke, Filth, and Fog”.

Manning’s daughter Olivia inherited his talent for writing and published five books. Field of the Stranger, a highly original read, won the London Book Society Choice award in 1948. Another polymath – an explorer of psychic fields, a landed cosmonaut – she illustrated this novel with her own wonderfully witty black ink drawings. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh out loud at priceless passages such as Olivia’s description of the antics of a fortune teller, “She’s great at it – once she told Margaret how she saw a bright change coming, and Margaret got the job in Dublin in no time after.”

Another literary gem worthy of Hunderby is the incident of the wart. “I knew a young chap – he was a footman at Mount Charles – and he had a wart, and he was ashamed to hand round the plates on account of his wart. I was always warning him not to meddle with it, but he cut it, and what happened but he got the jaw lock and died in a fearful manner, twisted and turned like a shrimp, with his heels touching his head.” Arch humour continues in Olivia’s novel with chat over afternoon tea about the perils of mixing tipples with talent. “‘Why,’ declared Miss Pringle, ‘I have lived for many years in Booterstown, Dublin, and everybody knows that Dublin is swarming with writers and artists, most of them geniuses and all drinking themselves to death. I am told one cannot enter a public house without falling over them. Or them falling over you more likely.’” Strangers misbehaving.

The hilarity of an amateurs’ night out is most accurately captured in a calamitous village play scene: “Amidst an excited murmuring, the curtain jerked spasmodically and slid up on the left side; our expectation was increased by a glimpse of a posed female chorus in plumed bonnets, violet velvet capes and white Empire gowns. The curtain fell. There was another jerk, and this time the righthand curtain jumped up coquettishly, only to sag back to its comrade … As if to show that they had only been joking, the curtains suddenly fled dramatically apart …” Her tragicomedy reaches a hysterical crescendo when the chorus starts belting out The Charladies’ Ball in “nightmarish counterpoint”. Who will survive?

Olivia fretted in her prizewinning novel about the survival and subsequent disappearance of country houses: “I was afraid that Mount Granite might fall a prey to house demolishers, who were exploiting the temporary shortage of materials by buying up eyesores, gaping roofless to the weather. I had seen so many wreckages of architecture, besides rare specimen trees felled and sold for firewood, that I was fearful such a fate might befall The Wilderness.”

Almost three decades later John Cornforth would worry in Country Life 19 January 1974, “A policy for historic houses seems to be much harder to work out in Ireland than in England for historical as well as economic reasons, and places of the importance of Castletown, County Kildare, and Malahide Castle, County Dublin, have only survived through lucky last ditch operations, organised in the first case by Desmond Guinness and the Irish Georgian Society, and in the second by Dublin Tourism in conjunction with the National Gallery and Dublin County Council.” As Frank Keohane critiques, hotelisation was nearly as great a threat as demolition during the crazy boom years. One word: Carton. Two words: Farnham House. Saved, but at what a cost. Love; hate. Such Ballyhoo. Wish they were Luton Hoo. Anyhoo. It can be done and undone. Three syllables. Ballyfin.

It’s all about Huntington Castle this wintry weekend. First sight of the castle is a romantic fairytale come to life. A mosaic of yellow squares (in 1888 it was the first house to have electricity installed in Ireland) flickers through a veil beyond The Pale of leafless spidery branches entwined with Celtic mist and mysticism. It’s crowned by jagged toothed battlements (spaces for fairies) silhouetted against the melancholic velvety sky. Country Life, Tatler and Vogue are stacked up in coffee table demolishing piles. Huntington is so photogenic it could easily be the cover boy of all three.

A pair of peacocks, two pigs, two cats (Nutmeg and Spook), two lurchers and three dachshunds (but no partridge in a pear tree) greet strangers. There are flowers on the first floor and soldiers in the attic. Only the latter are dead, strangers in the night. “I believe time is spiral,” confides Alex. “It’s linked to quantum mechanics. When apparitions appear they’re like jumbled video clips out of sequence.” He leads ghost tours at Halloween and the house and gardens are open to the public most of the year round. The castle must pay for its keep (pun). “We’ve developed bed and breakfast around this tourism. These houses drink money. It costs €25 an hour to heat Huntington. We’re not suitable for weddings and turning the house into a venue would destroy the fabric.”

Twin gilt mirrors in the drawing room frame back to front latticework, crewelwork, fretwork, trestlework, needlework and pieces a’ work. Reflections in the glass; reflections of the past. “The Aubusson tapestries are incredibly all done by hand,” reveals Alex. “They’re a real show of wealth, of opulence. The arrow slit window cut into one of the tapestries is a retained feature of the original castle.” It’s Friday evening. Time for dinner. Outdoors, the gardens slowly disappear into the tender coming night. Whatsoever things are lovely, think on these things. The dining room is dim with haunted shadow, walls fading through a glass darkly to trompe l’oeil in a mirage of Bedouin tent hangings and a fanfare of fanlights.

Centuries of ancestors in oil paintings watch the strangers in the room encroaching on a space of their own. Barbara St Leger, daughter of Warham St Leger, Mrs Alexander Durdin, born 1748 died 1820. Theric Hon General Sir William St Leger MP, Lord Deputy of Munster, 1627. Lieutenant Edward Jones, born 1688 died 1741. Helen, wife of Arundel Hill, daughter of Garrett Nagle and maternal great grandmother of Mrs Herbert Robertson, born 1752 died 1830. Matthew Jones, Collector of Youghal, 1625, father of Mrs Melian Hayman a maternal great great grandfather of Mrs Herbert Robertson, born 1719 died 1768. Alexander Durdin, legum doctor of Trinity College Dublin, born 1821 died 1892. Mrs William Leader Durdin, Mary Anne Drury daughter of William Drury, born 1801 died 1883. Mrs Alexander Durdin, Melian Jones Hayman, daughter of Matthew Hayman.

Barbara St Leger for one has never left Huntington. Dinner by candlelight is served. Winter salad with goat’s cheese and soda bread, beetroot aplenty, for starter. Salmon steak, creamed Wexford potatoes and seasonal vegetables with dill mayonnaise is the main event, a rhapsody to the countryside. “We use eggs from our own hens,” notes Alex. Pudding is elderflower posset (raspberries on top; Florentine to the side) just as good as The Culpeper’s in Spitalfields London lemon variety. Which is very good indeed. Both times it’s a work of quaffable art.

And so to bed. Fond bedfellows. Strangers misbehaving. Leaving behind the dying embers of the day, the journey, as rambling as this article, takes sighing twists and tiring turns along narrow wainscot lined passages and staircases heavily hung with armoury and taxidermy and history. “That snouty crocodile,” points Alex, “was shot by Great Aunt Nora.” The naming of bedrooms is a rather charming country house tradition. In clockwise order, the principal bedrooms at Drenagh in County Londonderry, a Sir Charles Lanyon special marooned in the mosses of Limavady, are Orange Room, Monroe Room, Bow Room, Blue Room, Balcony Room, South Room, Green Room, Rose Room, Yew Room, Chinese Room, McQuillan Room, McDonnel Room and Clock Room.

At Huntington, in any (very) old order, 16 principal bedrooms are similarly named after colours and features including: Blue Room, Green Room, Yellow Room, White Room, Red Room, Mount Room and Leinster Room. As Sir Edwin Lutyens once remarked, “I am most excited about towels.” He’d love the bathrooms here. They’re the first resort, the last word, something to write home about, fit for the life of Tony O’Reilly. Elizabethan style plasterwork ain’t the norm for an en suite. It is here. Slumber in the fourposter of the Blue Bedroom comes swiftly. But the solemn blackness of the night is rudely interrupted by bloodcurdling screeching. Yikes! Is it a banshee? What if a Lady Olivia Durdin Robertson style fate is still to come?

Sunday morning. “That noise you heard the first night is an owl’s mating call,” Alex confirms. Phew. Oh the agony (of leaving Huntington) and the eggs to see (for breakfast). But London’s calling, a city full of enticing strangers. Contemporary Indian architect Charles Correa considers, “Film is very close to architecture. Both are dealing with the way light falls on an object and defines it but the difference is time. A director can create huge shifts in emotion with a jump cut or an edit but architecture cannot move, so an architect can’t produce those sudden shifts. On the other hand, that stillness is also a magnificent property.”

Nowhere is as strangely still as a weekend in the otherworldliness of Huntington Castle. Rooms and gardens and gardens in rooms and rooms in gardens have evolved at an imperceptible pace over half a millennium. That wonderfully liveable layering of history inherent in homes such as architectural supremo Fergus Flynn-Rogers’ Omra Park, forever clinging unselfconsciously to the crooked coastline of County Louth’s Omeath, is apparent upon first entering the house. That unmistakable patina of age, authenticity whatever that is, so easily lost when the marquee of contents is auctioned while the green neon Fire Exit sign flashes above the entrance door for nobody to see. A proper ancestral pile. A gothic pastoral ideal. A place of Arcadian awakening. Not too trim and prim. Frank Keohane would approve. So very Clonmere Castle. So very Castle Rackrent. So very Huntington Castle. Whisper it. So very.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers People Town Houses

Gosford Castle Markethill Armagh + Thomas Hopper

Norman Gates

In 1970, the Honourable Desmond Guinness, Founder and first President of the Irish Georgian Society, participated in the television programme Whicker’s World. He told the presenter Alan Whicker that, “In England any dovecote by Robert Adam has been written up about 20 times in Country Life.” While the aforementioned magazine featured Gosford House in East Lothian in 1911, it does not appear to have ever included Gosford Castle outside Markethill in County Armagh. Gosford Castle has though appeared in several books on Irish architecture and rightly so.

Brian de Breffny’s Castles of Ireland, 1977, is a serious study of fortresses and fortified houses. He records, “When it was completed after 20 years, Gosford was claimed to be the largest country house in Ireland – a massive complex of circular towers, angular keep, bastions, towerlets and arches linked internally by rambling corridors. Pale granite quarried at Bessbrook in County Armagh was used for its construction. The Norman theme is pursued purposefully and executed with masterful originality.” Gosford Castle is no mean dwelling, but Coolattin and Humewood (both in County Wicklow) as well as Temple House (in County Sligo) would give it a long and strenuous run for its money as Ireland’s largest country house. Its restoration is approaching 20 years in the making.

Mark Girouard in his seminal 1979 work Historic Houses of Britain (before the avalanche of country house coffee table books truly spilled forth) mentions Gosford Castle when writing about Penrhyn Castle in Gwynedd, Wales, “Thomas Hopper had been fashionable ever since George IV – then still Prince Regent – had commissioned a Gothic conservatory from him in 1807 for Carlton House, London. Like most architects of his time, he was prepared to design buildings in almost any style. Hie had already designed one castle and altered another. His new Irish castle was Gosford in County Armagh. It had the distinction of being the first of the new castles to be Norman.”

“By the 1820s there were plenty of new castles but only one other new Norman one, and that in a part of Ireland which relatively few people visited. The reason why most people steered clear of Norman was straightforward. Norman was the oldest, most primitive and uncomfortable of the English styles (except of course Saxon, of which only a handful of churches, and no houses or castles, survived). It was hard enough to build something which looked sufficiently like a castle and was still reasonably comfortable without loading the dice against oneself by making it Norman too.”

The most recently published commentary on the castle comes from Kevin Mulligan, The Buildings of Ireland: South Ulster, 2013. It is part of the series founded by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Alistair Rowan similar to that on England, Scotland and Wales. “Set on a ramparted platform in dense woods, Gosford is a great brawny pile. Large and unforgiving, its castellated form rises mirage like, a picturesque grouping of square and circular masses with carefully recessed surface layers and an impressive display of Romanesque detailing. Even in pale granite, the architecture appears grave, a brooding grandiloquent expression of an invented past that represents the most assured instance of a revived Norman style in these islands.”

“It was probably Hopper’s role as arbitrator in a dispute between Nash and Lord O’Neill at Shane’s Castle in Antrim in 1816 that won him the commission here, brought to Lord Gosford’s notice perhaps by his agent William Blacker, who had also acted for O’Neill. It is difficult to gauge the role of the Earl in the actual choice of design, but there is nothing to suggest that he was the innovator. The Romanesque style was never to become popular, the general view holding that the forms of its apertures are inapplicable to our habits. Hopper’s unique feeling for Romanesque forms expressed here, and later in a more ambitious work at Penrhyn Castle in Wales, was undoubtedly conditioned by his birthplace in Rochester … Hopper was to express deep regret that he had come to Ireland, so disillusioned had he become with his patron in 1834. Even then the castle was far from complete.”

“The second phase of work, undertaken by Hopper’s assistant George Adam Burn for the 3rd Earl, involved the creation of a new bastioned entrance on the eastern corner of the north front, along with the completion of the family apartments in the straggling northwest range. The architecture subtly becomes more eccentric and the details more inventive. Adding a new two storey entrance block on the northeast corner, Burn disrupted the formality of its cubic proportions by forming an unusual engaged cylinder as a corner turret to the first floor Billiard Room.”

Sir Charles Brett devoted four pages to Gosford Castle in Buildings of County Armagh, 1999. Charlie’s epic series on the architecture of the Counties of Ulster was cut short by his death six years later. “An important work by one of the leading London architects of the first half of the 19th century, Thomas Hopper, 1776 to 1856. Sir Howard Colvin says that Hopper was an eclectic designer who held the belief that ‘it is an architect’s business to understand all styles, and to be prejudiced in favour of none’, and considers that ‘his most interesting and original works were the two Norman castles in which he effectively combined picturesque massing with a remarkable repertoire of Romanesque detailing which owed something to his familiarity with the 12th century keeps of Rochester and Hedingham.’ His pupils included the young Belfast architect John Millar, who worked on this commission with him, and signed a drawing showing the proposed front elevation.”

“The design was commissioned by Archibald Acheson, 2nd Earl of Gosford, after the previous house had burned down. Mark Bence-Jones says that it was ‘largely paid for by his wife, the daughter and heiress of Robert Sparrow, of Worlingham Hall, Suffolk: so that it is possible that the choice of so strange a style as Norman was hers; she was a lifelong friend of Lady Byron so may have absorbed some of Byron’s exotic and somewhat sinister brand of romanticism.’” Even before the castle was completed, the Gosfords separated and Lady Gosford returned to live in Suffolk where she died in 1841, eight years before her husband. Her Ladyship’s final earthly journey was not without incident. A record from the time states, “On its return journey to County Armagh for burial in the family vault at Mullaghbrack, her coffin was mislaid by the drunken servants whom Lord Gosford had sent to fetch it, and was conveyed by train to somewhere in the Midlands.” Charles Acheson the 7th Earl of Gosford, born in 1942, whose father sold the castle, lives in Suffolk.

Charlie continues, “Gosford is remarkably large, remarkably elaborate, and exceptionally well built – indeed, it appears not just defensible but practically indestructible. It is dominated by its great square keep with corner turrets containing chimneys, with subsidiary round and square towers. Bence-Jones considers that ‘the garden front has a strange beauty; the stone seems pale, Norman becomes more like Southern Romanesque’. The grouping is masterly; the walls are at different angles to each, so that there is a great sense of movement. Although Norman was really unsuited to 19th century living, the interior does not suffer from the heaviness one finds at Penrhyn.”

Bringing the commentary up to date Nicholas Sheaff, first Director of the Irish Architectural Archive, offers these observations in 2024: “The neo Norman style was practised with great conviction by the architect Thomas Hopper in the second quarter of the 19th Century. It was a ‘reinvention of tradition’ (to pirate historian Eric Hobsbawn’s theme) which had its origins in two distinct aesthetic currents. The first current was the neoclassical proclivity for the ‘elemental’ in architecture, awakened by the rediscovery of the Greek temples at Paestum and amplified by the architectural visualisations of Piranesi, particularly his ‘Carceri’ of the 1750s and Paestum etchings of 1778. The second current was the growing pride in British nationhood in the years after Waterloo, with an exploration of the national tradition in architecture and decorative design where the Norman (often dubbed ’Saxon’) was seen as the fountainhead.”

“As the architectural historian Hugh Dixon has suggested, Hopper’s massing of architectural forms at Gosford probably derives from the profile of the great Norman castle of Carrickfergus County Antrim, with its dominating central keep. Hopper’s interior planning embodies a narrative informality which draws on the example of his older contemporary John Nash, each room contributing a fresh spatial and decorative experience to the interior sequence. Hopper’s neo Norman architecture has a sculptural and emotive presence which is the antithesis of the rectilinear, rationalist neoclassical. A lithograph of circa 1830 portrays Gosford Castle in an almost untamed wooded demesne, an irregular architectural grouping set in a vigorous natural environment as advocated by Richard Payne Knight, that leading aesthetician of the picturesque. The lithograph presents a romantic vision of a turbulent landscape under a northern sky, as painted possibly by Jacob van Ruisdael, far distant in its style and impact from the arcadian vistas and golden light of Claude Lorrain.”

It is something of a wonder that Gosford Castle and its demesne both survive for ever since Thomas Hopper put pencil to paper it has had a rocky time. Financial constraints, disputes and overseas sojourns slowed down construction. In 1821 the outbuildings were progressing; in 1828 the Portland stone staircase was erected; in 1833 plasterers and joiners were working on the main rooms; in 1835 Lord Gosford became Governor in Canada for four years; in 1840 Newry architect Thomas Duff took over designing alterations and additions although Thomas Hopper remained involved at some level; in 1852 the Armagh Guardian reported that “a number of tradesmen are now engaged finishing the remaining wing of this building”; in 1864 the 3rd Earl died and the house became a family shooting lodge; in 1888 the 4th Earl sold the library; in 1921 he sold the rest of the contents; in 1940 the British army occupied the house; and in 1978 the Northern Ireland Forestry Commission acquired the 240 hectare demesne and castle. At least Gosford Castle didn’t burn down like its Georgian predecessor which had ended up a charred ruin in 1805.

An estate acquisition by the Forestry Commission normally rang the death knell for a house (not least Pomeroy House in County Tyrone) but somehow even after a failed stint leased to a hotel, Gosford Castle has survived relatively unscathed. The unrelenting permanence of this mountain of a house built of local stone rooted in geography and history continues to shine like a beacon in the woods. The road to its revival has not been smooth and is a story of changing ownership, court cases and construction delays – all sounding familiar as history repeats itself. Hopefully the restoration won’t take longer than the original construction.

At the opening of the 21st century, the Belfast architectural practice The Boyd Partnership led by Arthur Acheson (no relation to the Gosfords) was commissioned by the developer Gosford Castle Development Ltd to design the conversion of Gosford Castle into 23 homes. Arthur had form. He had restored the 17th century Finnebrogue House near Downpatrick and converted outbuildings to residential use. Arthur and his wife lived at Finnebrogue from 1994 until 2009. He died earlier this year. In her condolences, Lord Lieutenant of Belfast Dame Fionnuala Jay-O’Boyle noted the architect was founding Chair of Belfast Civic Trust.

The rockiest of times had immediately preceded The Boyd Partnership’s involvement. Marcus Patton reported in the Summer 2006 Heritage Review of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society that, “It is one of fewer than 200 Grade A Listed Buildings in Northern Ireland and is arguably our most important building at risk. The Society has maintained a keen interest in its future, and for those with knowledge of its recent history the confirmation of its sale for £1,000 to a private developer on 6 January will have come as something of a surprise.”

“Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this process has been the lack of vision shown by central Government as the long term custodian of the castle. We all recognise the significant challenges that such a building can present, and we want to see it sympathetically restored. However this surely could have been achieved in a manner which would have allowed public access to the most important internal spaces as well as facilitating wider economic regeneration.” The Society was concerned about the loss of internal architectural detailing and spatial integrity through the conversion process.

Just before his death, Arthur explained, “In the design of this restoration we as a company decided to break away from the typical apartment model usually associated with conversions of Listed Buildings. Instead we opted to develop the castle as a series of individual homes, each with their own front door, hallway, staircase and in some cases, as many as four floors of accommodation. These unique homes range in size from 92 square metres to 371 square metres.” The average sized three bedroom house in the UK is 88 square metres. This vertical arrangement maximised character and minimised room subdivision. Country townhouses.

The contract value of the development is £8 million; work began in 2006 and is well progressed in 2024. This restoration and conversion is in three phases: firstly, the western part of the family wing and the southern part of the courtyard into eight houses; secondly, the northern part of the courtyard into four houses; and thirdly, the eastern part of the family wing and all of the main block into 11 houses. The cylindrical tower is one of the self contained houses. The neo Norman decorative plasterwork and panelling of the principal rooms such as the Library have been restored. It is unknown if any of the military graffiti scrawled on internal walls will be retained in situ. The demesne is open to the public as a forest park.

Dixie Deane records a structure that predates the castle in his 1994 gazetteer Gatelodges of Ulster, “Circa 1700. Off the old county road, now absorbed into the enlarged Gosford Estate, lie two large ornamental ponds between which the avenue to the manor house led over a causeway. The access is below a semicircular headed carriage archway in a large wall of roughly carved rubble whinstone dressed in classically moulded carved limestone.” On either side of the archway are attached 15 square metre porters’ lodges. Each has a Dutch gable reminiscent of Richhill Castle, also in County Armagh, and Springhill County Londonderry. Perched on their roofs are Sir John Vanbrugh style arched chimneystacks mimicking miniature belfries.

A rerouting of the road to Tandragee means the former gamekeeper’s cottage dating from circa 1840 is now accessed off a cul-de-sac backing onto the Gosford Castle Estate. Probably by Thomas Hopper, it is as unique in its own way as the neo Norman castle: this rustic log cabin is a gingerbread house brought to life. Spindly metal columns prop up a steep hipped roof and frame a wraparound verandah. The walls are panelled with narrow strips of wood at various angles and the windows have triangular heads. A simple rendered contemporary extension doubles the ground floor accommodation of this diminutive dwelling. The cottage is now a two bedroom holiday let.

Gosford Castle is a marvel in so many ways. For starters, why did the 2nd Earl and Countess of Gosford select neo Norman instead of the more popular Gothic or Italianate styles? Perhaps it was in the spirit of choosing your ancestors wisely. In a country of castles to show off your ancestry the next best thing to living in a Norman castle would be erecting and living in a neo Norman castle. The turn of the 18th century entrance archway and lodges – Blenheim Palace on Keizersgracht – are very special. The lodges are windowless but roofed and vegetation has been removed. Most marvellous if not miraculous of all is the survival and reuse of the wooden former gamekeeper’s cottage.

Gosford Castle itself has never looked better. The huge revivification is finally nearing completion to house 23 new Lords and Ladies of the Manor. The white stone glistens in its dense forest surroundings like a fairytale scene. Surprisingly there was no enabling new development as part of the restoration and redevelopment. The Planning Appeals Commission has though in 2024 allowed on appeal a development of 11 one and a half storey contemporary cottages in the abandoned car park to the rear of the castle courtyard. The adjoining walled garden will be restored as part of this residential development.

Commissioner Laura Roddy reports, “The scale and massing proposed with the low elevation design would respect the Listed Building. Whilst the proposed dwellings would be of a more modern design than the castle, this, combined with the simplicity of the design would ensure that the proposed dwellings would be sympathetic to, and do not compete with or detract from, the castle.” She concludes, “Overall, I find the appeal proposal would be of a sympathetic scale of development and would respect the character of the setting of the Listed castle and walled garden. Further, it would restore the Listed walled garden, reinstate the historic pathway between the castle and walled garden and include a significant level of landscaping which would be sympathetic to its setting.” So in the end enabling development was allowed – just for the walled garden not the castle.

And that concludes the definitive tale of Gosford Castle, spanning two centuries and delivered in different voices over four decades, its origins best summarised by Nicholas Sheaff’s narrative of two distinct aesthetic currents.

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Architects Architecture Art Design Hotels People Town Houses

IDA Global Headquarters + Iveagh Gardens Dublin

The Green Stuff

Everyone knows St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. But not so many people are aware that its southside buildings back onto Iveagh Gardens, a lower profile yet equally fine park. The brick rear elevations of Newman University Church (a windowless apse), Museum of Literature Ireland (a bow window and a chamfered bay with Gothick windows) and Stauntons on the Green Hotel (a pair of shallow chamfered bays) all rise above the archery grounds.

Iveagh Gardens are entered from the opposite side, off Upper Hatch Street. A new addition to the encircling cityscape, this time facing the park, is the IDA Ireland global headquarters, completed in 2019. Designed by Dublin practice MOLA, the transparent façade is a glacial foil to the verdancy of the gardens. IDA Chief Executive Martin Shanahan says, “The new location at Three Park Place provides IDA Ireland with an excellent location from which to market to global investors.” The IDA was previously located for 35 years at Wilton Place opposite the canal. Wilton Place is being redeveloped to the design of architects Henry John Lyons.

The Anglo Irish Guinness family have done so much for Ireland including Desmond and Mariga Guinness establishing the Irish Georgian Society in 1958. “Without a doubt,” writes Carola Peck in Mariga and Her Friends (1997), “both Desmond and Mariga worked unremittingly and unstintingly to save Dublin’s architectural heritage.” A century earlier, Benjamin Guinness leased Iveagh Gardens to the Dublin Exhibition Palace. The gardens were designed by landscape architect Ninian Niven, merging French Formal and English Landscape styles. His descendent Rupert Guinness 2nd Earl of Iveagh donated the gardens to the nation in 1939. The public – and IDA employees on their lunch break – can still enjoy the one metre high maze, sunken gardens with fountains, archery grounds, rustic grotto and cascade.

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Architecture Art Luxury People Town Houses

Desirée Shortt + 38 North Great George’s Street Dublin

China in Her Hands

“I’m a 20th century girl,” breathes Desirée Shortt. She spent the closing quarter of that century as Ireland’s most successful china restorer. Before that she worked abroad including in America and Britain. “Los Angeles was my love affair. London was my friend. And Dublin is my marriage.”

“I’m a Dub. I’m from Dublin 4.” She is sitting next to a roaring fire in her elegant raised ground floor drawing room. “My grandparents owned Montrose which then became the RTÉ television centre. The original house was built by the Earls of Pembroke in the 19th century. I grew up a couple of miles from there in a big house on Anglesea Road. I saw a lot of my grandparents – we went for lunch on Sundays and for Christmas and Easter. I was privileged.”

Desirée reminisces, “All I wanted as a child was food – extra jelly and cream! I remember the lunches with the butler Byrne and his wife Mrs Byrne who was the cook and two standing footmen and three housemaids and the chauffeur who drove the Rolls Royce. To me a garden meant greenhouses and five gardeners. Folie de grandeur!”

“I was spoiled! I ruled the house from the age of six. What I wanted I got. My father was 20 years older than my mother. He was 53 when I was born, she was 33; my only brother was eight years older than me so I don’t remember him very well as a child. The males didn’t really figure in my early life as far I was concerned. I was my mother’s pet lamb! I was mostly brought up by women – I went to Catholic convent schools.”

The fire continues to roar; seagulls are howling on the street beyond the two tall sash windows. Desirée suggests it was both a good start and maybe a bad start. “I had a privileged upbringing but a hard learning curve lay ahead of me. I had to go out into the real world. I was one of the first of my lot to go to London. And from London I went to the US. I arrived in New York and rode the Greyhound bus to LA. The timing was right – I lived in California for three years. Lot of sunshine, lots of yachts, lots of men!”

Ireland called her back. “My mother had died, and my father was ill. He was a very nice man – he died aged 87. And I thought now I’m free! I was so excited about going to Brussels to work in the Common Market. I was a secretary there but it wasn’t a great success. They all spoke English so I didn’t improve my French. I’d a French nanny growing up so I used to understand when my aunt and mother talked about me in French. ‘Très mauvais. Très très mauvais!’”

“Then reality struck. I needed to settle down – with a house not a husband.” Ireland called her back, this time for good. Desirée relates, “I was 34 and I didn’t want to get married. To me marriage is a cage. Someone opens the door and then the door is locked on you. I just wanted freedom. I didn’t want to pretend to be a good cook with five screaming kids and a boring husband and a mortgage and locked in a cage. Best thing I ever did was not get married. In those days married people were very suspicious of single women. Wives thought you were after their husbands.”

“My godfather Patrick Glynn was an eminent solicitor and he said to me, ‘You need to buy a nice new two bed apartment. Ladies do not buy houses on North Great George’s Street.’ So of course I bought this house the next day. I had friends who lived across the road. There was an elite group of us – we were hedonistic and had parties. One of them kept saying, ‘Why don’t you buy the house?’ It had been up for sale for five years. And I looked over at this place and there seemed endless people coming in and out and of course there were – 27 of them!”

“It was up for sale for five years. I thought, me? No! Go on. Me? No. So I woke up that morning and thought I’m going to buy it. I paid 8,000 punts and wrote a cheque.” That was in 1974. She says, “There were 27 sitting tenants. It took me 17 years to get them out.” The fire roars a little more. “Relationships were not good – they hated me. ‘That one – who does she think she is?’ I knocked on their doors and deliberately collected the rents once a week. Rent was 40 pence; the income for the house was 415 punts per annum. Somebody once said, ‘There are no flies on Desirée and if there are they’re paying rent!’”

An Irish Georgian Society grant helped pay towards restoration of the roof and repointing the brickwork: she is a great supporter of the Society. “Otherwise, the house was actually in quite good condition,” Desirée admits. “It was just tired. Decorating it was a huge job. I would finish work and spend all evening painting the rooms myself on a ladder. Even the three storey staircase hall with its six flights. I couldn’t afford a decorator. I painted the dining room with six coats and then a semi-lacquer coat.” At the end of the return is her kitchen. “That’s my nest, not that I cook.” And beyond that an exquisite town garden. “It’s all green and wonderful in the summer. I’m very keen on mirrors in gardens.” Climbers grow across the basement area.

“I now have five one bed apartments on the other floors. Rent is a bit more than it used to be. No flies! I’m a very good landlord and they are very good tenants. We respect each other and are very courteous. They have security of tenure. I live in the raised ground floor and first floor and the return and have the garden.” Georgian Dublin houses are built on a gigantic scale. Desirée’s reception rooms with their 4.3 metre high ceilings are more like state rooms. She explains, “My memory was very definitely dependent on that memory of all the rooms being big at Montrose. So in a funny way 100 years later I wanted to live in a big house! Of course, I didn’t realise you don’t live in a big house for free.” So she made the house work even harder, all 560 square metres of it.

“Greatly to my surprise I launched a restoration china studio in my basement. I hadn’t a clue about china – I didn’t know the difference between a cup and saucer! Just before that, I went to London and saw a sign at the V+A for ‘China Restoration’, and I thought why not? So I did the six week course and came back to Dublin and set up as a professional. I don’t like metal and I don’t like glass. But china grabbed me, I just felt the texture. The dealers soon knew I was special and the studio just took off. Dealers would buy something at an auction with a missing finger or missing head or missing something. And I saw the market for china restoration.”

Her past professional experience came in useful: “In California I had worked for McCann Erickson who were the top ad agency in the world. They had staff of 300 and that was just in one office. I knew I had to sell. I did the china restoration for 25 years – I had a staff of 28 and trained a total of 283 students.” The house was working hard but not hard enough: there were still flies on the principal two floors. “Location agencies started taking an interest in the house. They would ring me and say, ‘We have some American film clients at the airport. Could we come and have a look?’ So 36 films were set here.”

Desirée confides, “Stephen Fry was my favourite – I had lunch with him. He was dressed in full 19th century costume for a film about Oscar Wilde. And of course we had something in common straight away. The interesting thing is that this house was the home of Professor John Pentland Mahaffy, Oscar Wilde’s tutor. We had that discussion – he’s a brilliant conversationalist. I’m not too bad myself.” The builder and first occupant of the house was another distinguished Dubliner. Stuccodore Charles Thorpe [Thorp?} built the house in 1785; he would become Lord Mayor of Dublin 15 years later.

“I also hired out my reception rooms for dinner parties; when the Foreign Office had conferences what could they do with the wives? So the wives would come here – I could seat 40 in my dining room. I didn’t do the cooking, I left myself free. I hate cooking! I would buy in the wine and I had a team of waiters and caterers. I was free to wander around pretending to be the hostess and again amusing them. That was a huge success. I had big companies and small companies dine here too. I would say 10,000 people a year came through this house over four decades. Every room in this house works for a living.”

One evening, Desirée’s two occupations of china restoration and playing hostess clashed. “In 1985 the famous Chinese Warriors from Xi’an came to Dublin. There was a huge party of 400 guests at Royal Hospital Kilmainham. I went to the opening with an American house guest. That was fine. I came back home. I was giving a dinner party afterwards, as one did in those days. And the phone rang. ‘Two of the warriors have got broken, you must come to the museum now.’ It was a government minister. ‘I can’t, I’m having a dinner party,’ I replied. ‘We’ll pick you up in 10 minutes.’”

“My American house guest took over as host of the dinner party which he thought was great fun. He had a great time entertaining his pals in the house for the next three days. The taxi arrived and I spent three days at the museum representing the Irish Government. Scaffolding used for putting up lighting had collapsed hitting two of the figures and they were originals, not fakes. A Chinese professor arrived, not a word of English of course, we both smoked, we understood each other perfectly. All thanks to body language … and smoke rings!”

She recalls, “Because it was the Government, 10 workmen arrived in about four seconds. They built a support round the broken terracotta warriors. A full size horse head had come off one. When it was fixed and it came to having the support removed, that was the nastiest moment. ‘Please don’t let the head come off!’ After the restoration was complete I asked could I publish this and the Government said no, it would be too embarrassing. No publicity and I thought, fair enough. So I picked up the phone, picked my people, and within 20 minutes the whole of Dublin knew exactly what had happened. That was great fun and about four years later I was lucky enough to go to China. And I went to Xi’an which was fascinating, absolutely fascinating, and I swear one of the warriors winked at me! I’m probably the only European who has ever been allowed to touch them.” In 38 North Great George’s Street, the fire is still roaring.

Desirée Shortt, a 20th century girl still enjoying life in the 21st century. “I’m lucky I have my own little bubble – somebody cooks for me, somebody drives for me, and I’ve very good friends.” And a very good 18th century house in the city she loves most.

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Art Design Fashion Luxury People Restaurants

San Lorenzo Restaurant Knightsbridge London + High Society

Swimming in the Whirlpool of High Society

Who said we didn’t end up at midnight in Princess Diana’s fav Knightsbridge haunt San Lorenzo three years ago to the day? Or a month earlier join influencers for a day at the races? Or fast forward a few seasons to find ourselves singing black tied carols with London’s finest on Pall Mall till dawn? As for the maquillage, English Heritage have a lot to answer for … Tell us, what are you doing?

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Architects Architecture Design People Town Houses

Nancy Mitford + 7 Rue Monsieur Paris

Love in a Temperate Climate

She adored Derek Hill (the painter) and couldn’t stand Le Corbusier (the architect). She wrote the biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Louis XIV. She was the cousin of Clementine Lady Beit, last doyenne of Ireland’s great house Russborough. Her nephew Desmond Guinness co founded the Irish Georgian Society. She had a pet chicken and cat. She wrote bestselling novels Highland Fling, Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love among others. And she loved Paris. Enter Nancy Mitford, our favourite female English novelist.

She lived in the 7th Arrondisement on the Left Bank. “A very charming flat between the courtyard and the garden,” was how she described her French home. “The days go by and I have no desire to move from my house and garden.” Her sister Diana Mosley said, “As soon as possible, in 1945, she got a flat in Paris, where she lived for 20 happy years.” She never lived in England again. Nancy wrote to her mother, “I am so completely happy here… I feel a totally different person as if I had come out of a coalmine into daylight… Oh my passion for the French!”

It was a charmed existence. “The houses she visited ‘glittered like miniature Wallace Collections’ and the women were generally ‘glittering with jewels’,” records Harold Action in his 1975 biography of Nancy Mitford. He offers tantalising glimpses into her Parisian life: “Highly diverted by the difference of French and English social conventions, full of admiration for General de Gaulle, enchanted by the details and incidental episodes of the Parisian scene, she became ardently Francophile, yet she remained English to the core.”

“For the next 20 years, the happiest of her life, Nancy settled in Paris. Even before settling there she had put these words into the mouth of her hero Fabrice: ‘One’s emotions are intensified in Paris – one can be more happy and also more unhappy here than in any other place. But it is always a positive source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town. The rest of the world seems unbearably cold and bleak to us, hardly worth living in…”

“Always a strenuous walker, Nancy was able to familiarise herself with the intimate old Paris behind the boulevards and the Hôtel de Ville, the quays and narrower streets with high roofed buildings, with the venerable Place des Vosges and the classical mansions on the left bank of the Seine so long inhabited by French nobility whose names had inspired Balzac and Proust. Balzac’s Madame de Sauve might even have suggested Nancy’s Sauveterre. The British Embassy was full of her friends. Our Ambassador Duff Cooper and the glamorous Lady Diana made it sparkle as never before with poets, painters and musicians.”

“Before the end of 1947 she had the good fortune to discover an ideal apartment, the ground floor of an old mansion between courtyard and garden in the Rue Monsieur, which she referred to henceforth as ‘Mr Street’. ‘I’ve got a perfectly blissful and more or less permanent flat,’ she informed in December 1947, ‘Untouched I should think for 60 years. I spent my first evening removing the 25 lace mats with objects on them mostly from Far Japan (dainty). The furniture is qualité de musée – such wonderful pieces, now you can see them.” Her character Cedric sounds positively autobiographic in Love in a Cold Climate: “In Paris I have an apartment of all beauty. One’s idea of heaven.”

Little wonder Nancy was a Francophile and honorary Parisian. Aren’t we all? Rue Monsieur is the Lad Lane of Paris. A tranquil oasis surrounded by all the action. Where Rue Monsieur tips the louche sounding Rue de Babylone to the north of Nancy’s pied-à-terre is the intriguing looking La Pagode. Under wraps for now, this oriental building was built as a community hall in 1896 to the design of architect Alexander Marcel before improbably becoming a cinema in the 1930s. Presumably our favourite female English novelist caught the odd matinée at La Pagode.

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Art Design People

Min Hogg + The Seaweed Collection of Wallpapers + Fabrics

Finding Material

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“It’s sort of feeble really,” says Min Hogg. “Open the property section of any newspaper and you’ll see page after page of boring beige interiors. I blame technology. People just want to switch on this and that but can’t be bothered to look at things like furniture and paintings.” Her own flat is neither boring nor beige. Quite the opposite. It’s brimming with antiques and art and personality. And magazines. “The red bound copies on my shelves are from when I was Editor. The loose copies in boxes are all the subsequent issues.” Min was, of course, founding Editor of the highly influential magazine The World of Interiors.

“My mum would have made a brilliant Editor but she was awfully lazy,” confides Min. “She always made our houses really nice without any training, none of that, she just did it. She was a great decorator. You bet! So was my grandmother.” Min’s first plum role was as Fashion Editor of Harpers and Queen. Anna Wintour, who would later famously edit American Vogue, was her assistant. “We hated each other!” Min recalls, her sapphire blue eyes twinkling mischievously. “I was taken on by Harpers and Queen over her. She really knew I wasn’t as utterly dedicated to fashion as she was. By no means!” Nevertheless, Anna was the first to leave.

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Home Garden Brompton Square London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Thank goodness then for an ad in The Times for “Editor of an international arts magazine” which Min retrieved from her bin. She applied and the rest is publishing history. The World of Interiors was a roaring success from day one, year 1981. “I submitted a three line CV,” she laughs. “I didn’t want to bore Kevin Kelly the publisher with A Levels and so on!” It didn’t stop her being selected out of 70 candidates. “I sort of knew I’d got the job. I ended up having dinner with his wife and him that night. I think probably of all the people who applied, I was already such friends with millions of decorators. Just friends, not that I was doing them any good or anything, I just knew them because we were likeminded.”Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Home Brompton Square London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Studying Furniture and Interior Design at the Central Art College must have helped. “Well it was too soon after the Festival of Britain and I really didn’t get it. The only person who taught anything was Terence Conran. He was only about a year older than any of us actually. But you could tell he wasn’t into Festival of Britain furniture either which, I’m sorry, I don’t like and never did.”

“Come and have a look at the view from the kitchen, it’s really good,” says Min stopping momentarily. “It’s like living opposite the Vatican,” pointing to the plump dome of Brompton Oratory. Back in her sitting room, the view is of treetops over a garden square, a plumped up cushion’s throw from Harrods. As for choosing an interior to publish, “If I liked it, I’d do it. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t! I came to the job with this huge backlog of interior ideas. We never finished using them all. I’m blessed with a jolly broad spectrum of vision, and as you can see, although I’m not a modernist I can appreciate modernism when it’s good. I don’t like Art Nouveau either but I can get the point of a really good example of anything.”

Appropriately Min’s top floor which she bought in 1975 looks like a spread from The World of Interiors. “I don’t decorate, I just put things together. I’m a collector,” she confesses. Eclectically elegant, somehow everything fits together just so. “John Fowler was an innovator. He was frightfully clever.” So is Min. She laments the disappearance of antique shops. And junk shops. “London used to be stuffed with junk shops. Now it’s seaside towns like Bridport and Margate that have all the antique shops. There’s nothing left in London. Just the few grand ones.” Interiors may be her “addiction” but Min is interested in all art forms. She’s been an active member of the Irish Georgian Society ever since it was founded by her friends Desmond and Mariga Guinness. “I love the plasterwork of Irish country houses,” she relates, “Castletown’s a favourite.”

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Address Brompton Square London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

With her vivacity and an email address list to die for, it’s little wonder Min’s parties are legendary. She even makes a fun filled appearance in Rupert Everett’s autobiography. But it’s not all play between her Kensington flat and second home in the Canaries. She’s still Editor at Large of The World of Interiors. Plus a few years ago she launched the Min Hogg Seaweed Collection of Wallpapers and Fabrics. It began with Nicky Haslam telling her: “I need a wallpaper for an Irish house I’m decorating. You know about colour and design.” So Nicky gave Min an 18th century portfolio of botanical seaweed prints for inspiration and off she went.

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Seaweed Collection Wallpapers © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“Mike Tighe, the former Art Director of The World of Interiors, joined me,” she explains. “For me it was a physical thing, cutting out paper patterns by hand. Mike did all the computer work. I learnt to do a repeat and everything else. It’s funny how you can learn something if you’re interested. By pure luck the finished result looks like hand blocked wallpaper. If someone gives us a colour we can match it. I like changing the scale too from teeny to enormous.” It’s a versatile collection, printed on the finest papers, cottons, linens and velvets. Prominent American interior designers like Stephen Sills love it. The collection may be found in a world of interiors from a Hawaiian villa to a St Petersburg palace. But not in any boring beige homes.

Min Hogg The World of Interiors Founder Seaweed Collection Fabrics © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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Art Fashion Luxury People Restaurants

Masterpiece London Art Fair Preview 2019 + Peter Fetterman Gallery

Shooting Stars

St Ermin's Hotel London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Such a conundrum. A clash of the titanic invites. House of Commons Summer Reception, St Ermin’s (not St Ernan’s) Hotel Afternoon Tea or Masterpiece Preview? We’ll go to all three, thank you. And so the afternoon seamlessly merges into the evening, swapping a marquee along the Thames for a roof terrace and later another marquee further upstream.

Royal Hospital Chelsea London Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

In the Houses of Parliament, The Right Honourable Kit Malthouse reminds us that we should be “building the Conservation Areas of the future”. He favours mansion blocks. Who doesn’t? St Ermin’s Hotel was once a mansion block. This year at Masterpiece it’s all about the people. Such constructs of beauty and art and beauty + art. One big photoshoot. And Perrier- Jouët with Lady Henrietta Rous.

Masterpiece Marquee 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Who better to share tips about photographs than Peter Fetterman of his eponymous gallery in Santa Monica? Prising ourselves away from Scott’s obligatory potted shrimps on Melba toast, we find Peter singing abridged Frank Sinatra into his mic, “And now… the time is come…” It’s the Saturday after the Private View and a sweltering 33 degrees in Chelsea. Speaking this time, revealing his English accent: “It’s a hot ticket! Thanks for braving the heat. This is my third year at Masterpiece. I come from a very humble background. I feel like the child who flew to the moon being at this very posh fair!”

Masterpiece Preview London 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

He explains, “I was a filmmaker and moved by accident to California. I planned to stay there two weeks. I went along to a dinner party and the host was selling photographs – I was obsessed with them. I’d literally $2,000 to my name. I bought the lot for $400. I became a collector. You can reinvent yourself easier in America than Europe. I just love photographs! I started trading out of a rent control apartment. I bought more photographs and travelled round in a Honda selling them. Business escalated until now here I am!”

Pugin Table Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Masterpiece London Party 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Mask Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Painting Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Masterpiece London 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Statue Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Water in Dripping by Zheng Lu Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Party Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Perrier Jouet Bar Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Perrier Jouet Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Perriet Jouet Reception Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Basha Masterpiece Preview 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lady Henrietta Rous Masterpiece Private View 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lady Henrietta Rous Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lady Henrietta Rous Masterpiece Preview 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Masterpiece Private View 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Mark Francis Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Mark Francis Made in Chelsea Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Mark Francis Masterpiece Private View 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Royal Hospital Chelsea Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lady Lloyd Webber and Lord Snowdon Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lord Snowdon Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lord Snowden and Lady Lloyd Webber Mastepiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Charles Plante Rory O'Donnell and Friends Masterpiece Private View 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Lady Lavender Masterpiece 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Masterpiece Show 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

So what’s his take on collecting? “There are hundreds of years of painting. Photography is relatively new, only dating from 1839. I’ve seen its appreciation start from zero in the middle of the 1970s until now.” He points from the floor to the ceiling. “Collecting is all autobiographical. I grew up in an ugly gritty environment. But I knew there was another world, a beautiful one. Photographer and publisher Alfred Stieglitz was one of the first to promote photography as fine art. But it’s also a democratic medium, accessible to all. That’s what I love! There’s no one quite like Ansel Adams. His photography is in the Getty Museum but you can get a print for $1,200. Next door in Masterpiece you can only buy a Modigliani for £14 million.”

Masterpiece Party 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Peter notes great photographs are in demand so prices keep rising. Of course, there’s a price differential between a signed and an estate print. “There are two rules to collecting,” he argues. “Only buy what you love and from whom you trust. If you love it buy it.” Any regrets? “The only mistakes I’ve made is when I didn’t buy!”

Masterpiece Art 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

The one person missing from this year’s Masterpiece is Min Hogg. She died peacefully in her Brompton Square flat two days before the Private View. Two of her closest chums were Lynn Barber, the journalist, and Madam Fitzgerald, the former châtelaine of Glin Castle in County Limerick. Olda Fitzgerald’s late husband was the Knight of Glin, a former President of the Irish Georgian Society. Min was a dedicated Irish Georgian.

Masterpiece Artists 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“I love seeing other people’s houses,” she confided. On a visit to a particularly perfect country house in Sussex she chided “it desperately needs a faded throw over the back of a sofa”. She was impressed by The House of Lavender’s Blue. “It’s very World of Interiors. I love the T + G panelling in the bathroom!” Her own flat on the nursery floor of a Georgian townhouse was effortlessly stylish in a completely non designed way. She did, after all, coin the phrase “shabby chic”. When we interviewed Min about her wallpaper range she ordered, “Please don’t ask me what is my favourite house. That’s such a lame question!” We didn’t. Thankfully Min enjoyed the end result, the published feature: “I’m as happy as a clam!”

Masterpiece Artist 2019 © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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Architects Architecture Country Houses Hotels Luxury People

Coopershill House Sligo + Francis Bindon

Louder Sang that Ghost

Really, it’s the perfect Georgian box in the perfect grouping in the perfect setting. Coopershill House took 19 years to build; over 240 years later the house and estate are still in great shape. Dr Roderick O’Donnell succinctly states, “Coopershill is a classic Irish Georgian house – dead symmetrical.” Dr Maurice Craig observed it was “built of locally quarried ashlar, it has a fine bold cornice, as have nearly all Bindon’s houses.” Bindon, Francis Bindon. Coopershill was first attributed to this Irish architect by the Knight of Glin. Much more anon.

Deane Swift generously described Francis (they were friends) as “the greatest painter and architect of his time in these Kingdoms”. His designs tend to group the windows together towards the centre of the façade, leaving a mass of masonry on the corners. This occurs on the façade of Coopershill and at the country house he designed in County Kilkenny, Woodstock. It lends a certain monumentality to the architecture. Coopershill is designed to be seen from all angles: it’s a standalone cubic block devoid of wings, every elevation symmetrical, the house with no back.

A bit like Castle ffrench in County Galway. Coopershill may once have had parapets like those of Castle ffrench. “We recently visited Florence Court in Enniskillen,” says Simon O’Hara. He inherited Coopershill a few years ago from his parents. “I think the main block is about the same size as Coopershill.” These two houses share more than their massing in common: both have heavy rustication, a Gibbsian doorcase and a first floor Venetian Room. This is named after the Venetian, or Palladian, or Serliana window over the entrance door. At Coopershill, amusingly, the sidelights and semi-circular arch over the central light are blind. Inside the Venetian Room, it appears as a regular rectangular six pane over six pane sash window.

There are another two blind windows on the narrower west, or side, elevation. Unlike the entrance, or north, front, they don’t have wooden frames and glazing so are less convincing. “We repainted them to retain the symmetry of the architecture,” he records. But it is the similarity between the two principal elevations, the north (entrance) and south (river facing) which is most striking. They’re virtually identical. It’s a game of spot the difference: the end bays of the south elevation are closer to the corners giving more regular spacing to the window sequence. This even distribution lendsit a more conventional Palladian appearance; the grouping of bays on the north front make it look a little idiosyncratic, somehow more Irish.

The doorcase of the north elevation is replicated on the south except for glazing replacing the door itself. Under this central window, the wall looks unfinished. Could steps have once been there? Or was this elevation originally intended to be the entrance front? “The house took so long to complete,” Simon reckons, “that changes were made during the course of construction. It’s strange how the landing cuts across the Venetian window on the south front. A flying staircase would solve that design flaw!” Indeed a flying staircase like that at Woodbrook, County Wexford, wouldn’t interrupt the landing window. It’s a quirk and a charming one at that. The slope of the land from north to south would reveal the full extent of the basement save for the rubble wall. Below the wall is a kitchen garden which is put to good use for the Monsieur Michelin worthy top notch top nosh dinner:

Candlelit dinner is served in the dining room which looks out towards Kesh Mountain. Owner and Chef Christina O’Hara reminds us that “all the vegetables are from the kitchen garden” and “everything is cooked on the Aga”. At some stage an Irish rhubarb appears with a hint of curry. Nasturtiums add a dash of colour to the pale monkfish. Silverware, glassware, Wedgwood and Mrs Delaney coasters and placemats perfect the table arrangement.

Before dinner, Simon leads a tour of the top and bottom floors. “We’re slowly recolonising the whole house.” His parents spent £100,000 replacing the roof which is cleverly designed to capture rainwater between the two valleys and funnel it down to ground level. The second floor contains family as well as guest accommodation. The first floor – the Venetian Room, the Pink Room, the Blue Room and so on – is all given over to guest accommodation. Simon knows his stuff: he’s President of Ireland’s Blue Book which promotes the country’s finest historic hotels, manor houses and restaurants. Vintage travel luggage labelled “ABC” is piled high in a hallway. “Arthur Brooke Cooper”.

“Look at the architectural detail,” he observes, pointing to the swirl marking the juncture of the doorcases and skirting boards in the staircase hall. A pair of niches (a Francis Bindon motif) add more finesse. The basement is more or less still used for its original purpose. Although perhaps the servants wouldn’t have had a billiard room… A state of the art washing machine stands next to its cast iron Victorian forerunner. The wine cellar has historic earthenware pots from Hargadon Bros on O’Connell Street, Sligo. That pub is still going strong.

The two Desmonds (Fitzgerald and Guinness) were known to arrive unannounced at country houses to investigate their architecture. They certainly did at one other O’Hara house. The Knight of Glin wrote a piece called “Francis Bindon (c.1690 to 1765) His Life and Works” for the Quarterly Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society April to September 1967 (10 shillings). He makes a convincing case that Coopershill was very likely designed by this architect.

“Perhaps Bindon’s very last mansion is Coopershill, County Sligo, although like most of these houses, no documentary evidence exists for it. Tower-like and stark, of similar proportions to Raford, it is made up of two equivalent fronts composed with a central rusticated Venetian window and door, and a third floor three-light window. The fenestration is reminiscent of Castle’s demolished Smyth mansion in Kildare Place, Dublin. Coopershill is sited particularly well and stands high above a river reminding one of the feudal strength of the 17th century towerhouse. As at Raford, the roof is overlapping and 19th century.

The history of the building of Coopershill is an interesting and typically Irish phenomenon for the house was finished in 1774 though started in about 1755 for Arthur Brooke Cooper ‘before engaging in the undertaking, had provided for the cost a tub of gold guineas, but the last guinea was paid away before the building showed above the surface of the ground’. Cooper had to sell property, and it took eight years to quarry the stone. This 20 years of planning and building explains the extraordinary retardé quality of the house considering its recorded date.”

The Knight isn’t gushing in his summation of Francis’ architectural talent: “With the major exceptions of the Curraghmore court and Castle Morres, the Bessborough quadrants and Newhall, his ventures into the architectural field are not particularly distinguished. As he was a gentleman amateur, moving in the best circles in Dublin, he obtained commissions from his friends and relations. He made the most of his connection with the professional Richard Castle and was quite happy to borrow many ideas from him. His houses are mostly in the south and west of Ireland, an area in which Castle had no connections, so theirs was probably a dovetailed and friendly relationship.”

His critical tone continues, “On looking at the photographs of his buildings… one cannot help noticing the solid, four square somewhat gloomy quality of many of them. They are often unsophisticated, naïve and clumsily detailed but they nevertheless amount to a not unrespectable corpus, worthy to be recorded and brought in from the misty damps that surround so much of the history of Irish Palladianism.” He considers there’s one exception: “If it is his, the forecourt at Curraghmore is certainly his masterpiece.”

Desmond Fitzgerald introduces his piece by writing, “The name of Francis Bindon is today occasionally heard of either as a dim portrait painter to be found in the footnotes of Swiftiana or as the occasional architectural collaborator of Ireland’s most prolific Palladian architect, the German Richard Castle. What role he played in the partnership remains somewhat obscure, but Bindon’s name after those of Sir Edward Lovett Pearce and Castle ranks third in importance in the chronological history of the Irish Palladian movement… Bindon’s documented oeuvre is small but I shall seek to show that a number of houses that cannot be stylistically ascribed to Pearce or Castle probably can be given to him. He designed possibly only one public building [Mountrath Market House], but practised as a portrait painter.”

Coopershill survives amazingly intact. “It was a secondary house for most of the 19th century,” explains Simon. “Annaghmore was the principal O’Hara seat.” So while Annaghmore was much altered, Coopershill remained untouched by Victorian aesthetic enthusiasm. To cut and paste William Butler Yeats’ poetry: Coopershill is an ancestral house surrounded by planted hills and flowering lawns, levelled lawns and gravelled ways; escutcheoned doors opening into great chambers and long galleries. Perfection.

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Architecture Art Country Houses Design Luxury People

William Laffan + Abbey Leix Book Launch

Holland Days Source

Neither a Monday evening nor (apropos to an Irish shindig) drizzly weather could possibly dampen spirits. Not when it’s a party hosted by the dashing Sir David Davies and the lovely Lindy Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood last Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava the artist otherwise known as Lindy Guinness. And it’s probably worth mentioning the setting: the mid Victorian splendour of Lindy’s Holland Park townhouse city mansion.

International banker and businessman Sir David is President of the Irish Georgian Society. In between rescuing companies and country houses, Sir David leads a high profile social life (he counts Christina Onassis among his exes). Like all the greats, he once worked at MEPC. This party is all about the launch of a book on his Irish country house Abbey Leix. And Averys champers served with prawns and pea purée on silver spoons.

Two vast bay windowed reception rooms on the piano nobile of the Marchioness’s five storey house easily accommodate 100 guests. One room is hung with her paintings. Renowned Anglo American fine art specialist Charles Plante is an admirer: “Lindy Guinness brings forth abstraction in painting that mirrors the cubism of Cézanne and Picasso. Her works are irresistible.” It’s hard not to notice the staircase walls are lined with David Hockney drawings. Lucien Freud was Lindy’s brother-in-law and old chums included Francis Bacon and Duncan Grant.

The party’s getting going. Interior designer Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill is admiring the garden. Sir David’s glamorous sister Christine and her son Steffan are chatting in the hall. They’re from Ballybla near Ashford County Wicklow: turns out they’re big fans of Hunter’s Hotel. Writer Robert O’Byrne is talking to designer, artist and collector Alec Cobbe in the drawing room. “I still live in Newbridge House when I’m in Ireland,” confirms Alec. BBC3 Radio broadcaster Sean Rafferty is busy playing down his former illustrious career in Northern Ireland where he’s still a household name. “You must visit my cottage in Donegal.” A party isn’t a party without Nicky Haslam. Perennially topping Best Dressed Lists, the interior designer extraordinaire smiles, “I didn’t realise I was such an icon to you young guys!”

Fresh off the treadmill finishing the definitive guide to Russborough, a mighty tome on another Irish country house, Abbey Leix was erudite architectural historian William Laffan’s next commission. Sir David Davies bought the estate from the Earl of Snowdon’s nephew, Viscount de Vesci, for £3 million in 1995. William’s book celebrates the restoration of the house and its 1,200 acre estate.

“Thank you to Lindy for inviting us to her home,” he announces. “It’s very much a home not a museum. Someone asked me earlier was this my house. I wish it was! The only thing better than a double first is a double Guinness! Lindy is a Guinness by birth and a Guinness by marriage. And thank you to William for all the hard work. I asked him to write 100 pages and three years later he’s written hundreds of pages! The photographs are beautiful but do make sure you all read a bit of William’s great text too!”

The Knight of Glin’s widow Madam Olda Fitzgerald, mother-in-law of the actor Dominic West, is present. Sir David continues, “Desmond Fitzgerald was a great inspiration to me. Bless him, bless the Irish Georgian Society. I feel very honoured to follow in his footsteps as President. There are three other people I wish to thank without whom the restoration of Abbey Leix wouldn’t have been possible. John O’Connell, the greatest conservation architect in Ireland. Val Dillon, the leading light of the antiques trade. John Anderson, former Head Gardener of Mount Usher Gardens and Keeper of the Gardens at Windsor Great Park. I had to prise him away from the Royals!”

“Bravo!” toasts the Marchioness. She also owns Clandeboye, a late Georgian country house in Northern Ireland. Its 2,000 acre estate is famous for yoghurt production. The party is a resounding success: the launch is a sell out. A (fine 18th century) table stacked high with copies of William Laffan’s Abbey Leix book at the beginning of the evening is laid bare. Fortunately a few copies are available at Heywood Hill, Peregrine ‘Stoker’ Cavendish 12th Duke of Devonshire’s Mayfair bookshop.

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Architecture Art Country Houses People

Robert O’Byrne + Thomas Heneage Art Books London

A Knight in London 

Robert O'Byrne © lvbmag.com

A life in sound bites and superlatives; there’s no hiatus in the hyperbole. Friday evening. Thomas Heneage Art Books is back to back with aristos and aficionados. It’s the launch of Robert O’Byrne’s brilliant biography of Desmond Fitzgerald, the late last Knight of Glin aka the Black Knight. We’re on Duke Street St James (even the road has a double-barrelled name). Names, names, Madam Olda Fitzgerald and her daughters, son-in-law Dominic West, Min Hogg, Johnny Lowry-Corry 8th Earl Belmore, James Peill, Lindy Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava and more Guinnesses than last orders at the bar from Desmond downwards. My Goodness! My Guinness!

Irish Georgian Society Robert O'Byrne book launch © lvbmag.com

John O’Connell: “Easton Neston today; Chatsworth tomorrow.”

Robert O’Byrne: “You must do Curraghmore.”

Susan Crewe: “We’re really quite eclectic at House and Garden.”

William Laffan: “I seem to remember a lively lunch at St Pancras Hotel.”

Desmond Guinness: “Is Maurice Craig’s book Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size or Middle Class?”

Hugo Vickers: “I’m on a break between biographies.”

Madam Olda Fitzgerald © lvbmag.com