Lavender's Blue: Wherever there's design there's Lavender's Blue

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.

Beautiful as a Story

“Architectural fashion is so often a reaction to what went immediately before. There’s even a perceptible difference between the father A W Pugin and the son E W Pugin’s work. The second generation architect’s designs are more rationalised,” believes artist and architectural publisher Anne Davey Orr. “Later, the use of concrete in the 20th century would issue in a much more open expression of materials and structure.”

The penultimate decades of the last two centuries both stuck to something of a “more is more” mantra. A sort of turn of the century syndrome. Eclecticism gone wild. Not without honour and slightly mad. Pont Street for the 1880s and 90s; Postmodernism for the 1980s and 90s. Out went conformity and goodbye to context; in came variety and hello to contrast. It was the ever inventive cartoonist Osbert Lancaster who came up with the name Pont Street Dutch due to the style flourishing in Chelsea. It could easily have been North German Revival, Flemish Revival or New Queen Anne. Or even Hans Town or Cadogan. Sir John Betjeman abbreviated it to Pont Street, making it even more geographically precise. He calls it the “new built red as hard as the morning gaslight” in his poem The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel. These days the SW postcodes are as golden as they are terracotta.

That’s the name explained but who invented the style? Architect John James Stevenson claimed Queen Anne as his creation. The practice Ernest George and Harold Peto produced some of the most overblown examples in Harrington Gardens but really the style was to become synonymous with the dominating work of Norman Shaw. Pont Street rang the death knell, scrawled the writing on the wall, beckoned the banshee for regular terraces, heralding an asymmetric age of individualism. “Look at me, look at me!” screams each house as the rooflines tipsily whoosh and swoosh over more Dutch gables than Keizersgracht. Against the navy canvas of a sun drenched winter’s morning, and to be repeated nine years later on a sun drenched summer’s morning, the red brick dressed with white stone renders Pont Street a patriotic tricolour.

Such strength of character allows 20th century blips such as the picture window spanning the penthouse of 41 Lennox Gardens to be immersed into the wider townscape. The houses celebrate their birthdays: “1884” shouts 25 Lennox Gardens from metre tall letters on its third floor. A few doors up, 43 Lennox Gardens announces to the world it’s a year younger. A wander in wonder along the streets of SW1 and SW3, the blessed boulevards of the Cadogan Estate, throws up a maximalist impure visual feast, an aesthetic eyeful, for the devil and angels are in the detail.

At a glance, here are some of the hyperactive highlights. Keyhold silhouette broken pediment copper domes in Sloane Gardens. Double decker dormers in Culford Gardens. Witch’s hat copper turrets where Draycott Place meets Blacklands Terrace. Quoined porthole windows peering out of 54 to 58 Draycott Place. A neo Elizabethan fretwork loggia hugging 3 Cadogan Gardens. Pierless Brighton balconies clinging onto 85 to 87 Cadogan Gardens. A château mansard atop 89 Cadogan Gardens. Twin Queen Anne fanlights surmounting the doorcase of 105 Cadogan Gardens. Stumpy Ionic pilasters holding up egg and dart capitals framing the porch of 60 Cadogan Square. A pair of ballsy busty bulbous oriel windows on the side elevation of 63 Cadogan Square. And that’s just at a glance.

Pont Street the address bisects Cadogan Place Gardens under the watchful eyes of the 18 storeyed 1961 Jumeirah Carlton Tower. But the great swathe of red is mostly found between Sloane Street and Lennox Gardens. The extremities of Pont Street dive back into stuccoland. A morning of architectural investigation must be balanced by an afternoon of gourmet indulgence. Historically, afternoon tea was the outcome of dinner slipping to beyond 7pm by the opening years of the 19th century. Hiccupping ladies at first surreptitiously downed tea and gobbled cake in their boudoirs after midday. By 1842, trailblazing trendsetting taboo busting gal about castle Anna Maria Russell, 7th Duchess of Bedford, was bolshily dispensing tea in her sitting room to fill the gap created by the evening meal becoming later and later thanks to gaslighting. Fast forward to the Pont Street era and both sexes were merrily letting rip into cucumber sandwiches and scones with clotted cream in the drawing room or on the lawn. Where better then to indulge than 11 Cadogan Gardens, the hotel launched by the eponymous Estate in 2012? A Darjeeling fuelled calorific high awaits: Carrot Cake Explosion; Chocolate Fudge Bar; Lemon Drizzle Loaf; Macarons; Raspberry Orange Battenburg.

The first part of the hotel’s name is mildly misleading: the reception rooms and 54 bedrooms are spread across four townhouses (“5, 7, 9 and 11 Cadogan Gardens” being something of a mouthful). Bright red brick with white trimmings, in some places to stripy effect (more bands than a 12th of July march); terracotta tracery and scrolls; rusticated Doric columns and shortened Ionic columns; rectangular metal balconies and semicircular brick balconies; windows of every frame and shape and type (more casements than a West Belfast cemetery; and again more sashes than a 12th of July march) and orientation (more than a Pride march in London); oriels, chamfered bays and rectangular bays; flat, round arched and segmental arched windows; mini, Dutch and swan neck gables; 11 Cadogan Gardens is as dynamic Pont Street as it gets. The last part of the hotel’s name is wildly accurate. It faces a densely treed green square. The only two London members of the exclusive Relais et Châteaux group are 11 Cadogan Gardens and its sister hotel further round the square, The Chelsea Townhouse.
The interior is just as eclectic. A maze of lacquered cloistered sequestered panelled hallways and lobbies and corridors and passageways leads into the consciously picturesque opalescent Drawing Room. Starched linen at the ready, afternoon tea awaits, designed to instil a divine inertia into the remainder of a stimulating day. Decked and bedecked, espaliered and jardinièred, the Terrace is tucked between the townhouses and the mews. Alive with remote anticipation, it’s a place to dwell on the meaningfulness of life. Another surprising place is the Versailles inspired Mirrored Hall, a space designed to contemplate the advantage of beauty. Monochromatic photographs of supermodels line the descending staircase to the basement gym. Oil paintings of aristos line the ascending staircase to the bedrooms. Souls of different ages bordering the universe in process of consummation. This hotel has a distinct and dynamic personality, one that is warm and sensuous.

Over to the father of town planning Manning Robertson of Huntington Castle, County Carlow, for some pontification on not just Pont Street but classification itself. Everyday Architecture, 1948, “Definitions of architecture are as unsatisfactory as any other expositions of the aim and meaning of the arts; but if architecture is to be alive at all it must clearly involve the erection of buildings to suit the demands of the period, and the embellishment of those buildings according to the dictates of the materials in use, the treatment being a direct reflection of the outlook of the epoch, based of course upon past work, insofar as it is applicable. We cannot say that the 19th century, which produced principally a dead copying of the past, did not reflect itself truly; it was, on the contrary, amazingly accurate in illustrating that the worship of material prosperity is not consistent with a high level of art.”

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