Category Archives: Country House

What a Waste


The history of Knockanally, County Kildare is rather opaque, although it is known that the Coates family, the first of whom appears to have arrived in Ireland in the early 1700s, acquired the land on which it stands from the Aylmers who lived not far away at the now-derelict Donadea Castle (see Another Blot on the Landscape « The Irish Aesthete). Some kind of residence was built at Knockanally and in the mid-18th century this was occupied by one William Coates, known to have died in 1766 when the property was inherited by his eldest son, Matthew. When his grandson William Lancake Coates died in the following century, Knockanally was inherited by William Coristine Coates, the son of his cousin. His descendants appear to have continued living on the estate until it was taken over by the Irish Land Commission in 1942 and subsequently divided among various farmers. The immediate demesne and main house were then sold to a Captain Sheppard, who in turn sold it to the Maharani of Baroda. In 1959, ownership passed to the Rehabilitation Institute, which used the house as a convalescent home for the victims of polio.Further changes of ownership seem to have followed before Knockanally was bought in 1983 by Noel Lyons, who turned the land into an 18-hole golf course. 





As it appears today, Knockanally dates from c.1843 when commissioned by William Lancake Coates on a site east of the original house. The architect responsible was Dublin-born William Deane Butler, much of whose work involved designing institutional buildings such as court and market houses, although he did receive commissions for a number of country houses also. As noted by the late Jeremy Williams, Knockanally is almost a cube, ‘if its height is assessed on the three-storied central bay.’ Of two storeys over basement and faced with wonderfully crisp limestone ashlar, the building is entered via an Ionic portico flanked by Venetian windows with a third directly above it. On this level, windows within shallow recesses open onto balconies: these can also be found on each of the four-bay side elevations. Seemingly the interior featured a central, double-height and top-lit hall. Williams has noted that this is a reduced version of the hall in Dublin’s Broadstone station, designed by John Skipton Mulvany who, he suggests, may therefore have had a hand in Knockanally. As for the very substantial and elaborate gatelodge at the entrance to the former estate, J.A.K. Dean dates this to c.1870, too late to have been designed by either Butler (who died in 1857) but may have come from Mulvany as he lived until that date. 




In September 2010 it was reported that one of the country’s banks had appointed a receiver over Knockanally Golf Club, set in 125 acres; this move came a few days after creditors of Ferndale Leisure, the holding company behind the club, had met to appoint a liquidator; at the time, with an economic recession at this height, quite a number of Ireland’s golf clubs were going into receivership. Three years later, the club, the main house, gate lodge and a number of golf ‘lodges’ in the grounds, was sold to a Warwickshire-based company, St Francis Group for  €1.1 million: some years earlier, this portfolio had been valued at €3.5 to €4 million. Quite what has happened since then seems to be unclear. Refurbishment work was carried out on the house and other buildings on the site, but in September 2018 the local Leinster Leader reported that the golf club had again closed down and was to be offered for sale. Since then, both the house and gate lodge have remained closed and boarded up, with inevitable deterioration in the fabric of both buildings. A dreadful waste.

The Bishop’s Legacy



After Monday’s tale of Riverstown, County Cork, here are the scant remains of another, slightly earlier property built by another member of the same family. In 1710 Dr Peter Browne, former Provost of Trinity College Dublin, was appointed Church of Ireland Bishop of the United Dioceses of Cork and Ross. Ten years later, he acquired some 118 acres of land to the immediate south-east of the city, with the intention of constructing there ‘a good, substantial and convenient dwelling house and a chapel thereunto adjoining together with suitable offices.’ Named Bishopstown and finished in 1726 at a cost of more than £2,000, he created this property and surrounding demesne to serve as “a fit and convenient residence for himself and his successors, the bishops of Cork and Ross”.  The adjacent chapel was consecrated in 1730. Alas, his successors failed to appreciate this legacy and already by 1792 the house at Bishopstown was described as being ‘in a state of decay and totally unfit for the residence of the bishop.’ In the early 1830s the place was leased to a farmer and then in 1878 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sold the land and buildings. It passed through various hands before being bought by Cork Corporation about half a century ago. Many of the buildings were then in a better condition than is now the case (and some of them have been demolished over the intervening years). What remains is a former farmhouse incorporating an early 18th century limestone doorcase retrieved from the since-lost mansion, and the skeletal remains of the chapel (see below). In the immediate vicinity, jostling for attention with a children’s playground, are a pair of small, three-arched bridges and fragments of a circular battlemented shell house, thought perhaps to have been built during the episcopacy of Robert Clayton, the bishop here 1735-45. Bishopstown today is a heavily-developed suburb of Cork city.


Rescued from Ruin


The extraordinary work of sibling stuccodores Paolo and Filippo Lafranchini, born in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino but resident in Ireland for many years, has featured here before (see, among others, To the Muses « The Irish Aesthete and Exuberance « The Irish Aesthete). A relatively little known example of their skills can be found in Riverstown, a house to the immediate north-east of Cork city. The land on which the property stands came into the possession of the Browne family in the second half of the 17th century, but assumed much of its present appearance after 1733 when it became the residence of Dr Jemmet Browne, a Church of Ireland clergyman who would serve successively as Bishop of Killaloe, Dromore, Cork and Ross, Elphin and finally Archbishop of Tuam, which position he held at the time of his death in 1782. The earliest known reference to Riverstown is found in Charles Smith’s The Ancient And Present State of the County and City of Cork, published in 1750, where it is described as ‘a pleasant seat of the Lord Bishop of Cork. The house is beautified with several curious pieces of stucco, performed by the Francinis, brothers.’ We know, therefore, that the work executed in the saloon at Riverstown was carried out either before Browne became Bishop of Cork (1745) or very soon afterwards. And that he continued to carry out improvements on the building in the years after Smith’s book appeared, since a hopper is dated 1753. The exterior gives little idea of the rich decoration inside. The entrance front is modest, of two storeys and five bays, although what was the garden front is more substantial, running to seven bays and three storeys. The north end of the house the gable ends were replaced by a pair of full-height canted bays, that to the front climbing an additional storey, this last alteration believed to date from c.1830

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It tells us a great deal about this country’s cosmopolitan culture in the 18th century that a Church of Ireland clergyman – and one who rose to become an archbishop – should have decorated his private residence with pagan iconography. The saloon in Riverstown includes a series of eight panels across three walls, all of them including figures. The fourth wall has three windows and between these are a pair of mirror set in elaborate frames. The ceiling is also covered in stuccowork, centred on an oval frame derived from Nicolas Poussin’s Le Temps soustrait La  Vérité aux atteints de L’Envie et de la Discorde, painted in 1641 for Cardinal Richelieu and now in the Louvre. As for the figurative wall panels,for a long time thought as being random, the source for these was identified by Joseph McDonnell in 1991 as being taken directly from the Roman antiquarian Paolo Alessandro Maffei’s edition of Leonardo Agostini’s Gemme Antiche Figurate, published 1707-09. Beginning with the chimneypiece, the panel above it depicts the mythological Roman figure of Marcus Curtius on horseback, while next to it is one showing Aeneas carrying his father Anchises. The third panel shows Liberty, followed by Ceres and then Fides Publica, Fortuna and Cincinnatus. Finally, the panel at the far end of the room and facing the chimneypiece depicts Roma mounted in a chariot. That chimneypiece is not the original one (which is now in a first floor bedroom) but a replacement installed during restoration work in the 1960s). As already mentioned, between the three windows are two framed mirrors (still holding their original glass) surrounded by elaborate plasterwork incorporating flowers, foliage and female busts. The opposite wall is centred on a door, its frame with a finely carved broken pediment. To the north of the saloon are a pair of bow-ended drawing rooms, again much of their present decoration dating from the 1960s restoration of Riverstown. 






Riverstown remained in the possession of the Browne family until the middle of the last century but by the 1950s it stood empty and the threat of irreparable deterioration seemed so likely that moulds of the saloon were made by the Office of Public Works; these were installed in the Irish President’s residence Áras an Uachtaráin. Not long afterwards Riverstown and its surrounding land were bought by a Cork market gardener, John Dooley who in the mid-1960s collaborated with the Irish Georgian Society on restoring the building, thanks to donations from the public. By the end of 1965 Riverstown’s saloon had been restored to its former beauty, the initial work costing £717. The Dooleys were sufficiently inspired by this initiative to undertaken further work on the house and in the IGS’s January-March 1970 Bulletin, it was reported that one of the house’s two late 18th century drawing rooms ‘has been given a new dado, architraves, chimney-piece, overdoors and overmantel.’  Ten years after the society’s initial involvement, still more work had been achieved as a feature in the Cork Evening Echo noted, with the second drawing room walls covered in green silk and hung with 18th century pictures. Riverstown continues to be home to the Dooley family.

New Purpose Sought


Last November, the Connacht Tribune reported there had been no expressions of interest in acquiring Garbally Court, a large early 19th century house on the outskirts of Ballinasloe, County Galway, even though it was being offered for just €1. More than two years earlier, the building’s present owner – the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert – had offered to transfer Garbally Court along with some of the surrounding grounds to the authority for that nominal sum of a single euro. However, a commissioned Consultants’ Report had suggested expenditure of some €4.2 million would be needed just to stabilise the house and bring it up to a reasonable standard. While elected representatives of the area were keen for the acquisition to go ahead, in the hope that Garbally Court could be turned into a tourist attraction, thereby bringing business into the area, the County Council Executive’s advice to the group which needed to approve such matters prior to a full council meeting was that upgrading costs were prohibitive, even before running costs and possible future uses were taken into account. In November, the council’s director of services was quoted as advising councillors that the building ‘is not in our ownership and nor are we willing to take possession but the door is always open for anyone to come in and renovate the property for whatever purpose. But so far, nobody has come next nor near us.’ 




Garbally Court was built for Richard Le Poer Trench, second Earl of Clancarty. The Trenches claim descent from Frederic de La Tranche, his name supposedly derived from the family’s origins in the town of La Tranche in Poitou. Monsieur de La Tranche is believed to have left France as a result of religious persecution and settled in Northumberland in 1574. One of his sons, James Trench, a clergyman, settled in Ireland, becoming rector of Clongell, County Meath. His only child, Anna, married her first cousin Frederick Trench; it appears that he was responsible for initially buying the land in East Galway that formed the basis of the Garbally estate. The couple’s son, another Frederick, continued to acquire more land, especially in the aftermath of the Williamite Wars. In the next generation. Richard Trench married an heiress, Frances Power, in 1732; she brought further wealth and property to the family. Their eldest son, William Trench sat in the Irish House of Commons like his father before him, before being created first Baron Kilconnel (1797), then Viscount Dunlo (1801) and finally Earl of Clancarty (1803). He and his wife Anne Gardiner had no less than 19 children, their eldest son Richard succeeding to the titles and estates on his father’s death in 1805. The second earl was a politician and diplomat of considerable ability. After sitting in the Irish House of Commons until the dissolution of the Irish Parliament in 1800, and then in the English House of Commons until he became a member of the peerage, after which he sat at Westminster as an Irish representative peer. Close friendship with Castlereagh meant that after the latter became foreign secretary in 1812, the earl was entrusted with a succession of crucial diplomatic missions, attending the Congress of Vienna with the rank of plenipotentiary. He served twice as Britain’s ambassador to the Netherlands, that country’s king making him Marquis of Heusden in 1818; following his retirement as ambassador, he was also created Viscount Clancarty in the English peerage in 1823. But thereafter, and following Castlereagh’s death, he largely withdrew from political life and turned his attention to life in County Galway, where work was well underway on building Garbally Court. 




As mentioned, the present Garbally Court dates from the early 19th century. Its predecessor on the site had been badly damaged by fire in 1798, but it would be more than 20 years before work on a new house began. In 1819 the second earl commissioned designs from English architect Thomas Cundy, best-known for acting as surveyor of the Grosvenor family’s London estates and being involved in the initial development of Belgravia in the years prior to his death in 1825. Garbally Court is Cundy’s only work in Ireland, although he did design a number of lodges in various architectural styles for Coolmore, County Cork (see Trans-Atlantic Links « The Irish Aesthete) none of which were actually built. The architect, like others at the time, produced work in whatever style best suited his client. Hawarden Castle in Wales, for example, is – as its name indicates – in the Gothic manner, but Garbally Court is austerely neoclassical. Square in plan, the house is of two storeys and eleven bays, the entrance front relieved by a single-storey Doric porte-cochère, while the rear elevation has a single storey, three-bay bow. Regular and segmental pediments alternate over the ground floor windows. Originally the house was constructed around a central open courtyard but this was later covered and made into a picture gallery. The earl’s descendants continued to own Garbally Court until 1921 when, along with the surrounding demesne, it was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Clonfert for £6,750. The following year the diocesan boys’ school, St. Joseph’s College, moved to the site and constructed classrooms and other ancillary buildings close to the house. A boarding school was run here until 2008 when it closed down and since then a new school has also been built, hence the need to find fresh purpose – and a new owner – for Garbally Court. What both might look like remains to be seen.

Where Time Stands Still



When Joshua MacGeough died in 1817, he left Drumsill House, County Armagh to his younger son Walter, but with the provision that his three daughters took precedence in occupying the property until they either married, died or moved elsewhere. In the event, none of the trio married (and the last of them lived until 1861), so Walter, who would change his surname to MacGeough Bond, decided to build a new residence for himself on land owned by the family elsewhere in the county. In 1819, he commissioned designs for a house from siblings John and Arthur Williamson; they were related by marriage to Francis Johnston and John had also worked for a time in Johnston’s office as a drawing clerk. Nevertheless, the house the brothers produced shows little of Johnston’s influence. Faced in Caledon sandstone, The Argory is long and low, a two-storey, seven bay building, the east front almost entirely plain except for a porch added a few years after the main building had been completed. The west-facing facade is more elaborate, with a central, two-stepped breakfront, the upper portion of which has a horned pediment, the lower distinguished by fluted Doric columns supporting an entablature. Below this a wide elliptical arch has a lion’s head serving as the keystone, its extended tongue taking the form of an acanthus leaf. The main block of The Argory had barely been completed in 1824 before work started on a service wing on the building’s north side (the house has no basement). Behind this wing are a series of enclosed yards. 






The interiors of The Argory, County Armagh appear to have changed little if at all over the past century or more, retaining much of their late-19th century decoration and furnishings: it is as though time has stood still. In standard tripartite fashion, on either side of the entrance hall lie the drawing  and dining rooms, both of which have elaborate overdoors added in the 1850s to the designs of Thomas Turner, those in the latter room featuring scallop shells filled with fruit. Similarly, both rooms have splendid white marble chimneypieces with carved centre panels, that in the drawing room depicting the Death of Cleopatra, while in the dining room Ceres can be seen reclining with her Horn of Plenty. To the rear of the house, what had originally been a morning room was subsequently converted into an inner hall, with a massive chimneypiece of black marble and, above the door leading to the front of the building, a plaster frieze depicting a battle between warriors and Amazons, its design derived from that found below the entablature on the Temple of Athena Nike in Athens. 






The bow-ended entrance hall of The Argory, County Armagh is dominated by a  cantilevered Portland stone staircase that snakes up to the first floor with brass balusters and mahogany handrail. The walls here are painted to imitate sheets of Siena marble while at the foot of the stairs is the original cast-iron stove of Greek pedestal design, topped by a copy of the Warwick Vase and installed in the house in the early 1820s. A wide landing on the first-floor accommodates a large cabinet organ, initially commissioned in 1822 from James Davis but following the latter’s retirement, the work passed to James Chapman Bishop who completed the instrument in 1824; it was thereafter played to accompany morning and evening prayers for the household. Although part of the original furnishings of The Argory, the organ’s dimensions meant cutting into the vaulted ceiling to accommodate it in this location. On either side of the landing, long corridors lead to a succession of bedrooms which, as elsewhere in the building, are still furnished in the style of the late 19th century. The Argory continued to be owned by the MacGeough Bond family until 1979 when it was presented to the National Trust. Last weekend, the trust celebrated the 200th anniversary of the house’s completion with a variety of events on the property.


Langrishe Go Down


The Langrishe family were originally from Hampshire, where they lived for several centuries until one of their number, Lieutenant Hercules Langrishe, arrived in Ireland c.1650. His father was the first of the family to be given that distinctive first name (his sibling was called Lucullus). The younger Hercules had one son, John, who married no less than five times, his second wife being Alice Blayney, daughter of Henry Blayney, second Baron Blayney. She had previously been married to one Thomas Sandford, who held a long lease on lands at Knocktopher, County Kilkenny; following her own death, the lease was inherited by John Langrishe and finally in 1757 his only child (from a third marriage) Robert Langrishe completed the outright purchase of the fee simple of this property. His son, another Hercules, created a baronet in 1777, served as MP for Knocktopher for almost 40 years until the Irish Parliament was abolished in consequence of the Act of Union in 1800. A keen advocate of Irish legislative independence, he was also a supporter of Roman Catholic Relief: in 1792 Edmund Burke published his renowned Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe arguing the necessity for all remaining civil restrictions on Catholics to be removed. Following Sir Hercules Langrishe’s death in 1811, the baronetcy and Knocktopher estate were inherited by his eldest son Robert.




The name Knocktopher derives from the Irish ‘Cnoc an Tóchair’, meaning the Hill of the Causeway. Seemingly, it first appears in surviving records from the late-13th century Ormond Deeds, associated with the Butlers. That family was critical in the development of the area, although a Norman motte and castle were already developed here by one Griffin FitzWilliam in the closing decades of the 12th century (a telling indication of public attitudes to the country’s heritage is the fact that the motte, along with some masonry, survived until 1973 when the site was completely levelled). In 1312 the Butlers took possession of Knocktopher, thereafter making it one of their principal residences; in consequence, an urban settlement grew up around the castle and eventually in 1365 Edward III gave permission for a weekly market to be held there. In the previous decade, James Butler, second Earl of Ormonde had founded a religious house in Knocktopher for Carmelite friars. They remained there until the Dissolution of the Monasteries and in 1542 their property was granted by the English government first to Sir Patrick Barnewall, Solicitor General for Ireland, and then passed to Sir Nicholas White, Master of the Rolls and Privy Councillor. His family retained Knocktopher until 1677 when it was bought by Sandsfords and, as mentioned above, through marriage it then passed into the possession of the Langrishes who remained there until 1981.




As seen today, Knocktopher Abbey primarily dates from 1866 when commissioned by Sir James Langrishe to replace an older property on the site which seemingly had been largely destroyed by fire some years earlier. The architect responsible was John McCurdy, today best-known for his remodelling of Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. McCurdy’s output was eclectic: he also worked on the Museum Building in Trinity College Dublin and the Masonic Female Orphan School (now an hotel) in Ballsbridge, Dublin, as well as designing a number of private houses in diverse styles. At Knocktopher, evidently keen to emphasise the antiquity of the site, he opted for a loosely Gothic, asymmetrical manner, with suggestions of a French chateau, most notably in the three-storey entrance tower with Oriel window and steeply pitched roof. The building is faced in limestone ashlar, with granite used for door and lancet window dressings, the latter in bi- or tripartite arrangements. Further bipartite dormer windows are set into the roofline. What sets the house apart is that on the western side it incorporates parts of the medieval Carmelite priory, not least a great square tower of rough-hewn limestone and with window openings which may have been made by subsequent lay owners. Certainly a tall paired chimney stack suggests late 16th or early 17th century interventions and may hint at the appearance of the building lost to fire in the 19th century. But this must remain speculation, not least because access to the house’s interior was not possible. After being sold by the Langrishe family, Knocktopher Abbey was developed as a time share scheme. Today the service yard has been turned into a series of short-term self-catering units. A fascinating place that deserves closer study. 

A Charmer



Located on the outskirts of New Ross, County Wexford, Woodville dates from the first years of the 19th century and may have been built in 1807 when the property’s owner Edward Tottenham married Henrieta Alcock, daughter of Sir John Alcock; the Tottenhams had long been settled in this part of the country. Woodville’s site was clearly chosen because the land in front then drops away down to the river Barrow. However, this view was obscured in 1887 when the Dublin and South Eastern Railway opened a branch to New Ross, the line running along the banks of the river (the railway is long since closed). Of five bays and two storeys over basement, the house was originally two bays deep but was extended towards the end of the 19th century, with further alterations made during an extensive restoration in 2006. The Woodville estate was acquired by Patrick James Roche in 1876 and is still owned and occupied by his descendants who have developed charming and extensive gardens both in front and behind the main house. 


Period Piece


Back in 2010, while reviewing a biography of Derek Hill, the Irish Aesthete managed to affront a number of people by suggesting the artist’s reputation was less substantial than either he or his admirers might have wished. Indeed, some 24 years after his death, the question is likely to be asked in some circles: Derek who? Born in Southampton in 1916, after leaving school in 1933 Hill originally studied theatre design in Munich, before travelling eastwards through Russia, eventually visiting China and Japan. Returning to England, he took a job as costume designer at Sadlers Wells Theatre but then, encouraged by the couturier Edward Molyneux, he took up painting in a serious fashion. During the Second World War, he worked on a farm as a conscientious objector but still found time to paint and in 1943 had a one-man exhibition in London. In the aftermath of war, he spent a great deal of time in Italy, often staying with art historian Bernard Berenson at his villa I Tatti outside Florence. And he continued to paint, specialising in the genres of landscape and portraiture. Hill demonstrated a distinct aptitude for the former, especially when working on a small scale – in larger pictures he seemed to lose his way – and when presented with the kind of rugged prospect found in the north-west of Ireland, where he spent more and more time. The influence of Corot was always evident in this work, aligned with the beneficial impact of Cezanne. His portraits are more problematic, veering between acute character study and superficial likeness. Some of the finest are little more than preparatory studies; he could overwork a portrait and thereby mislay the sitter’s personality. But in their enormous number these pictures offer an insight into the scope of his social life, which took in everyone from Irish farmers to English grandees. That he had a weakness for aristocracy and royalty cannot be denied (he loved to go on painting holidays with Prince – now King – Charles); it was another aspect of his essentially old-fashioned persona. There is a well-known anecdote of Hill once being decried as a snob, to which he supposedly responded: “How amazing. I was only talking with the Queen Mother a few days ago, and she said just the same thing.” There were two drawbacks to his maintaining a busy social life, flitting from one grand house to the next: it made him appear trivial in the eyes of many people and it took him away from his work. Although he spent periods entirely focused on his work, and quoted Degas’ remark that “if the artist wishes to be serious . . . he must once more sink himself into solitude”, he was unable to apply this policy with sufficient rigour.






Derek Hill first came to Ireland in the late 1940s, invited here by the wealthy  Philadelphia-born socialite and art collector Henry McIllhenny who in 1938 had bought Glenveagh Castle, County Donegal, an estate some 15 miles south-west of where his forebears had lived until emigrating to the United States the previous century; at the time of their meeting, McIllhenny was working as Resident Art Historian at the American Academy in Rome. The two men thereafter remained lifelong ‘frenemies’ (to use a wonderful neologism) and in due course also neighbours because in 1953 Hill bought an old rectory, St Columb’s, just a few miles south of Glenveagh. Five years later, he visited Tory, a small island off the north coast of Donegal, where he rented a hut and spent time each summer painting for himself and also encouraging members of the local fishing community to do likewise, thereby creating a school of naïve painting, known as the Tory Island Painters, the best-known of whom was James Dixon. In 1982 Hill donated St Columb’s and its contents to the Irish State (McIllhenny had done likewise with Glenveagh Castle and gardens three years earlier) and thereafter lived in a small cottage nearby although he spent more time than hitherto in England. He died in London in 2000. 






St Columb’s dates from 1828 when, according to Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) it was constructed thanks to a gift of £400 and a loan of £380 from the Board of First Fruits; the surrounding glebe land ran to 25 acres. It remained in use as a Church of Ireland rectory until the death of the second resident clergyman, the Rev Henry Maturin in 1880, after which the building was leased to tenants before being sold. In 1898 it opened as St Columb’s Hotel, and continued to be used for this purpose until being bought by Derek Hill in 1953, the majority of guests over the intervening period coming to this part of the country either for fishing or shooting. Of two storeys and three bays, the house retains much of its original appearance, although a large and elaborate cast-iron single storey veranda to the rear seemingly was brought here from somewhere else. Inside, it has a typical tripartite design, with reception rooms on either side of a narrow entrance hall, that to the right presumably serving as a small study since the staircase immediately behind takes up considerable space. The decoration throughout is as it was when St Columb’s was occupied by Derek Hill and displays a fondness for Victoriana and William Morris papers, for needlepoint cushions and Staffordshire figures. The house is now a period piece, preserved as though its former owner had just stepped out for air, and deservedly ought to be kept as such even if, rather like Hill’s paintings, this will not be to everyone’s taste. It is open to the public for tours during the summer months, while, the adjacent yard buildings have been converted into a gallery space which hosts temporary exhibitions each year.

For more information about the house and gallery, see Glebe House and Gallery | Explore a world-class collection of art (glebegallery.ie)

 

Decidedly Quirky



Ardress House, County Armagh is a wonderfully quirky building that appears to have begun as a modest farmer’s residence but then, as we say in Ireland, ‘got notions.’ The earliest part, a gable-ended brick house of five bays over basement, probably dates from the late 17th century when constructed for one Thomas Clarke. In 1760 heiress Sarah Clarke married Dublin architect George Ensor who in due course enlarged Ardress by adding a further bay to either side of the east facade (and probably the small limestone Tuscan portico) and a large extension to the rear accommodating a grand drawing room. Within a few years of his death, further changes took place , the front enlarged by a further bay on either side with tripartite windows, their lower parapets decorated with urns and undulating dressed stone at each corner. The extension to the north contains rooms but that to the south is just a blank wall, as can be seen by going around to the garden where it becomes one of a pair of quadrants with blind recessed panels and statuary niches, the latter holding busts representing the Four Seasons. Formerly a conservatory ran the length of the five ground floor bays on this side, helping to provide some unity, but without this structure, the imbalance created by the double bays to the east is more apparent, thereby adding to Ardress House’s quirky charm.





Text here…The interiors of Ardress House, County Armagh are as idiosyncratic as its exterior. To the front of the building immediately inside the entrance is a large arch opening into a sitting room, while through a door on the other side lies a small parlour. The main staircase in an extension to the north rises to a landing which then divides to give access to bedrooms in different parts of the building. Meanwhile, another eccentric feature of Ardress House is the location of the dining room, which would customarily be located to one side of the entrance hall: here it is located behind the drawing room but not accessed from it. Instead, the dining room is reached via a corridor to the rear of the building and then through a small external door (originally a small glazed building provided coverage for diners).





As mentioned earlier, in 1760 heiress Sarah Clarke married architect George Ensor, who oversaw a number of additions to Ardress House, County Armagh. One of these was the creation c.1783 of a large, rectangular drawing room behind the original building, its walls and ceiling elaborately decorated with neoclassical plasterwork, its design attributed to the preeminent Irish stuccodore of the period, Michael Stapleton. The tripartite ceiling is composed of a circular section with demi-lunes on either side, the former containing a centrepieces featuring Aurora in a chariot drawn by two winged horses. Other panels and medallions around the walls show various classical figures, including Cupid bound to a tree and observed by three females and a warrior kneeling before Minerva and another goddess. Between these, garlands of husk chains and ribbons swoop and  fall across the walls in a breathtaking, and unexpected, display of sophisticated craftsmanship in rural Ulster. Ardress House is today under the care of the National Trust and open to the public. 


Addio del Passato



Last Monday, the Presidents of Ireland and Italy jointly inaugurated a new public park in Lucan, County Dublin, the space henceforth to be known as Parco Italia. The reason for this somewhat unusual name? Since 1942 Lucan House, which stands at the centre of the 30-acre park, has been the official residence of successive Italian ambassadors to this country. The building here has, like so often, a long and complex history but in its present form was commissioned in the early 1770s by the estate’s then-owner Agmondisham Vesey who, although he consulted several eminent architects, played an active role in the eventual design. Vesey’s house replaced an earlier one, probably dating back to the Middle Ages but much altered over the centuries. A painting by Thomas Roberts produced shortly before its demolition shows what appears to be a late-mediaeval tower house with a fortified manor house with castellated roofline to one side. Vesey’s wife Elizabeth, a noted bluestocking (and close friend of Elizabeth Montague) lamented the destruction of the older building, ‘with its niches and thousand other Gothic beauties,’ but her husband was determined to start afresh. To do this, he not only had to overcome his spouse’s opposition but also the original house’s associations with noted Irish patriot Patrick Sarsfield, first Earl of Lucan. His forebear, Sir William Sarsfield, had acquired the Lucan estate in 1566 and although temporarily dispossessed during the Confederate Wars, several generations of the family lived there until the marriage in 1696 of heiress Catherine Sarsfield (a niece of Patrick Sarsfield) to Agmondisham Vesey, father of the man responsible for building Lucan House. 





As mentioned above, Agmondisham Vesey, displayed a keen interest in architecture despite his involvement in many other activities: a Member of the Irish Parliament, he was also a Privy Councillor and Accountant and Controller General of Ireland. Like his wife Elizabeth he liked to keep abreast of cultural developments: in 1773, during the period that work was underway on the new house, he was elected to the ‘Club’, the informal dining and conversational group established by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds 10 years earlier. Johnson and James Boswell granted him the notional title of ‘Professor of Architecture,’ and the latter wrote that Vesey had ‘left a good specimen of his knowledge and taste in that art by an elegant house built on a plan of his own at Lucan.’ Boswell exaggerated his friend’s role in the matter because while Vesey undoubtedly had a hand in Lucan House’s appearance, so did a number of architects, not least Sir William Chambers who in 1773 sent him now-lost ‘Designs for a Villa.’ It is thought that the facade of the building was based on this work, not least because in March 1774, Vesey wrote to Chambers, ‘I am much more intent in finishing the South front of your Plan at Lucan this summer.’ The aforementioned facade is of seven bays and two storeys over basement except for the breakfront three centre bays which feature an additional attic storey beneath a pediment (despite Vesey reminding Chambers ‘You have taught us to think pediments but common architecture). This central section is faced in granite ashlar with four half-engaged giant Ionic columns above a rusticated ground floor. Originally at that level the two bays on either side were given rusticated render, as can be seen in an engraving of the house produced by Thomas Milton in 1783, but this was removed at some later date. Lucan House’s design looks to have been the inspiration for Charleville, County Wicklow, designed by Whitmore Davis in 1797, although the facade of that building is entirely faced in ashlar and runs to nine bays. Meanwhile, at Lucan, the house forms a rectangular block, other than a three-bay bow to the rear that, as with the facade, rises three storeys over basement. 





If Sir William Chambers was involved in designing the exterior of Lucan House, James Wyatt, together with his Irish representative Thomas Penrose, can claim much credit for the building’s interiors, with Michael Stapleton responsible for much of the plasterwork found on many of the walls and ceilings in the ground floor, as well as the main staircase and first-floor lobby. Lucan House has some of the finest examples of neo-classical decoration in Ireland, beginning with the entrance hall, to the rear of which a screen of columns and pilasters painted to imitate Siena marble, provide access to the principal reception rooms. That to the immediate left here, now called the Wedgewood Room but originally the breakfast room, is a perfect square, its walls rising to a gently domed ceiling at the centre of which is a medallion depicting a warrior kneeling before Minerva accompanied by her maidens. Around the room, floral drops surround panels containing what appear to be grisaille paintings: in fact, these are in fact prints overpainted at some date when age had caused them to fade. To the rear is the drawing room, although this was intended to be the dining room. Its walls were left undecorated (and today covered in paper) but again the ceiling has been covered in plasterwork centred on another medallion, this one, somewhat unusually, featuring the Christ child and infant John the Baptist together with a lamb. The rear of the house is taken up by what is now the dining room but was originally intended to be the drawing room. The ceiling decoration here is simpler than that in the previous rooms, but the walls are decorated with plaster girandoles, their design found among those created by Michael Stapleton. Oval in shape, the bow in the window is echoed by a similarly curved wall centred on a door leading back into the entrance hall. This arrangement of the two rooms  – hall with screen of columns to the rear and central door opening into an oval room – is found in Castle Coole, County Fermanagh designed in the early 1790s by James Wyatt.
Agmondisham Vesey died in 1785 and having no children, left the estate to his nephew Colonel George Vesey. The latter’s only child, Elizabeth Vesey, married Sir Nicholas Colthurst and their descendants lived at Lucan House until the property and its contents were sold in September 1925 by Captain Richard Colthurst (later eighth baronet), after which it was occupied by Charles Hugh O’Conor and then his son-in-law William Teeling. In 1942 the building and surrounding gardens were rented by the Italian government and then bought 12 years later, to serve as a residence for its ambassador. It continued to serve the same purpose until this month, at the end of which the present ambassador leaves his position and the property passes into the hands of a new owner, the local authority, South Dublin County Council. What happens to both house and grounds in the future remains to be seen. 



For anyone wondering, the bronze buffaloes seen in the grounds and fibreglass horse in the entrance hall, all by contemporary Italian artist Davide Rivalta and placed in their present positions last year, are due to remain on site.