new life for Ireland’s Big Houses
Turn through the gates of Altidore Castle, an austere crenellated 30-room property built around 1730 for English army general Thomas Pearce in County Wicklow, and the light is lingering on the gold, copper and russet trees lining the driveway. Inside sits Thomas Emmet, a descendant of the older brother of executed 18th-century Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet. Emmet’s family bought the property in 1944, but the heir sees himself not just as a custodian of Altidore — rather something bigger. He is the next generation co-ordinator at Historic Houses of Ireland, which represents 200 properties from the medieval to Edwardian eras; he is carving out a role helping owners of Ireland’s grand mansions, dubbed “Big Houses”, “move with the times”. It is a rocky road.
These homes were built for the landed Anglo-Irish elite from the late 16th to the 19th centuries. With a heavy baggage of colonialism — including exploitative rents and their owners’ financial splurging after the devastating mid 19th-century potato famine — the Big House was often seen as the “Protestant house on the Catholic hill”. Some 300 were torched by republicans, mostly during the 1919-21 war of independence and 1922-23 civil war.
Out of place and out of time in the new Irish Free State, some Big Houses were sold and their contents scattered, or turned into government buildings, schools, hospitals, hotels, even prisons; Altidore was temporarily a TB sanatorium. Others were left to rot or were demolished.
These properties can feel light years away from the multicultural Ireland of today and its priorities. A century on from the torchings, and two decades after the frenzy of the Celtic Tiger property boom, Ireland’s housing shortage is a key voter concern as the November 29 general election approaches.
Until recently, many Irish were content to let the sometimes decaying mansions slide into oblivion — relegating them, as architectural historian Robert O’Byrne puts it, to “white elephants” in a country that had moved on. But “there is unfinished business,” he says. “A reckoning with Ireland’s past”.
A newfound appreciation is emerging for the architecture and craftsmanship represented by the Big House, as places to visit, as hotels and event venues or — for those with deep pockets — properties to be restored.
With Ireland’s newfound wealth, garnered from its transformation in recent decades into a mecca for global tech and pharma companies, the neglect of country houses is “no longer the only or even necessarily the most frequent option”, O’Byrne says. “Instead the possibility of a new life [for them] has become viable.”
In his new book The Irish Country House — a New Vision, he highlights 15 rarely seen properties whose rescue, restoration and revival seek to tell a “new story and present a new Ireland”.
They include Ballysallagh in County Kilkenny — a grey stone property with a formal Italianate garden built in 1722 on land that once belonged to the family of composer Henry Purcell. The house was passed through the family, largely unaltered, until it was sold in 1940. The sale dispersed most of the furnishings and by the time Kieran and Geralyn White bought Ballysallagh in 1987, it was dilapidated. The couple’s restoration project carefully reintroduced period pieces and landscaping that have returned the house to its 18th-century grandeur.
“It’s a challenge to take on restoration of a historic property,” says O’Byrne, who has done much to raise public appreciation of their architecture and craftsmanship in more than a dozen books and his Instagram account, The Irish Aesthete, with its 38,400 followers. “It takes a particular kind of madness — it’s not for everyone.”
But not everyone has to: the Irish are re-examining their heritage by visiting country houses in ever increasing numbers. Historic Houses of Ireland says the number of properties open during this year’s annual Heritage Week was up 40 per cent on last year, with record visitor numbers.
‘The Irish Country House: A New Vision’, by Robert O’Byrne, photography by Luke White (Rizzoli USA)
“Ireland has matured as a nation over the past 30 to 40 years” — in part, because of increased travel, says Anne O’Donoghue, chief executive of the Irish Heritage Trust. “Irish people have started to appreciate the wonderful architecture that’s in our midst. The less nuanced understanding of the [Big House] history has evolved.”
Terence Dooley, director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, sees “a curiosity there that wasn’t there before . . . We’re only at the start of the reappraisal of the country house in Irish history.”
Tom Somerville, a barrister who grew up in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Syria but made his career in England, sits in the light-filled drawing room of Drishane. He is the ninth generation of his family to live in the grey brick Georgian home in West Cork overlooking the sea, since it was built in 1780.
Beside the piano, glass doors open on to a lawn that rolls towards the bay. The walls are crammed with paintings and portraits — many by the house’s most famous occupant, the writer Edith Somerville, who ran it during the tumultuous revolutionary period. Tom is the grandson of her nephew and spent his summers there as a boy before moving to Drishane with wife Jane and two sons in 2007. “If you’re Anglo-Irish, you have to decide in the end which side of the hyphen you go to,” he says. “I always knew I was going to come back.”
The Big House “has its place now — partly because it is no longer the symbol of power”, he says. Like many Big Houses, Drishane avails of tax breaks through opening to the public, typically for 60 days a year. The Somervilles also rent the house out in the summer — often to Americans or for weddings — and run three holiday cottages on their land.
“You need money coming in,” Tom says bluntly. “If it’s not, you’ve had it . . . People think you must be made of money — you’re not, because you have a place like this.”
Drishane, with its wide entrance hall, octagonal study, original 19th-century wallpaper — crumbling in places — and family “mementos” including a dinosaur tooth in a glass cabinet and an emperor’s roof tile from Peking, is one of around several dozen Irish houses still in the hands of their original families (Dooley estimates 30; O’Byrne says the received wisdom is less than 100). Somerville says that direct connection prevents them from being “just a room — with a nice view, but just a room”.
But it’s a big undertaking: in 2018, the descendants of the family that had owned Howth Castle on the north Dublin coast for eight centuries finally called it a day. The contents were auctioned off in 2021 in a sale billed as “800 years of history — entire clearance”.
“The easiest thing to do with a house like this is to sell it and go off and live in a bungalow — and they do do that,” says Somerville. “I don’t want to be the one to sell it.” But he admits that “if in the end it becomes a burden” for his children, “it will have to go. You can’t spend your life devoted to a house, no matter how beautiful.”
These storied houses periodically come on the market. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary bought and remodelled the mid 19th-century Gigginstown House in County Westmeath and John Collison, co-founder of Irish fintech company Stripe, owns Abbey Leix in County Laois, built by English architect James Wyatt in the late 18th century (such was Wyatt’s standing that he is buried in Westminster Abbey). O’Leary reportedly paid £580,000 for his 1,000-acre property in 1998; in 2021 Collison paid around €20mn for his 1,120-acre estate, according to the Irish Times.
Few transformations are as extensive as that undertaken by Mexican-born Allen Sanginés-Krause at 18th-century Killua Castle in County Westmeath, which features in O’Byrne’s book. The London-based investment banker fell in love with the ruin “at first sight” in 1999: with no roof and a tree inside, it had been abandoned for more than half a century.
He has spent two decades reimagining it, geothermally heating the house and installing solar panels and a small wind turbine, and filling it with his collection of medieval and early Renaissance art and furnishings, including a table believed to have been made from a Spanish ship wrecked in 1588. The result, O’Byrne says, is a “repository of the past . . . a home for the 21st century. It also manages to be quite unlike anywhere else.”
As O’Donoghue of the Irish Heritage Trust puts it, “heritage is not a static thing”.
The Blue Book lists castles, manors and other Big Houses to visit or hire for events. Take Ballyfin, in County Laois, now a hotel (and recently in the news after a guest was killed there; his son has been charged with his murder); the Regency mansion and its Capability Brown-inspired landscaped grounds, were bought by an US businessman two decades ago after it had been turned into a school, and sumptuously restored — including original parquet floor from the 1820s — at a cost of tens of millions of euros.
Big Houses and the cultural repositories they represent remain vulnerable. “We are still losing them,” says O’Byrne.
But Emmet, who is 31, is optimistic. “Altidore is going to outlive me,” he says. “And that’s quite a nice way to face one’s mortality.”
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