Christmas at Adare Manor: ‘There is a real sense of celebration, the atmosphere is electric’

Bronagh Wilkinson, resort florist

If you’ve ever gazed in appreciative awe at a stunning Christmas tree in a hotel and reflected on the hours involved in decorating it, spare a thought for Bronagh Wilkinson, who erects the giant 24ft tree in the Great Hall at Adare Manor in Co Limerick and decorates it with thousands of glass baubles and soft white lights, not once, but twice, between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

The tree, one of 18 natural ones grown in Co Kerry that are part of the hotel and estate’s festive display, is replaced with a fresh one in a middle of the night covert operation carried out by Wilkinson and an army of “elves”, so that there isn’t a sign of drooping limbs or falling needles when the hotel’s guests check in for their Christmas stay.

“We change the tree in the week before Christmas. We have a very definite plan. We break it down into four different sections,” Wilkinson says. The aim is that the replacement tree is indistinguishable from its predecessor. “The most important thing is the lights, they are key, because if that goes wrong, you’re back to stripping the whole thing down again, and you’re talking about dozens of sets of lights. We’re literally up there on cherry pickers.”

All this happens in the dead of night, as does much of the initial roll out of the festive decorations across the hotel and the estate, including The Carriage House restaurant, which takes place over a 10-day period in November. The trees are grown specially for the hotel. “We work with Nick Foley of The Christmas Tree Farm in Killarney and we’d walk the farm with him, picking out the trees that we’re going to use for the following year. They’d have been pinpointed from a couple of years out.”

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If you think getting the box of decorations down from the attic is a chore, spare a thought for Wilkinson, whose firm Harris and Wilkinson Distinctive Floral Design looks after the hotel’s floral arrangements throughout the year. “On the big tree alone, there would be literally thousands of decorations and baubles.” And what goes up, must come down. “The take down and the putting away is a massive affair. It all has to come down in one night; midnight on the fifth of January is when we start.”

The ballroom is given over to Wilkinson and her team to carefully sort and pack away the thousands of ornaments, garlands and seasonal decorations to go into storage. “It’s a bit like putting your child on a flight or something, you are just hoping that nothing goes wrong.” The process takes a week. “All the different areas would be catalogued for storage.”

As well as the feature trees in the public areas, some guests have trees in their suites and bedrooms. “They would be a bit more subtle, there’d be more greens with golds, more gentle, and they are artificial trees.” The colour scheme throughout the hotel is “burgundies, golds, forest greens, they are the key colours, we don’t do any harsh reds. It’s classy elegance, there’s nothing garish about it.”

Wilkinson has some input on the Christmas display from the hotel’s owners, JP McManus and family, who bought the property in 2014. “Mrs McManus is a huge fan of Christmas, and she would be very involved with the overall look. She loves her flowers, loves Christmas, and she would be a big part of what we do.” For the Christmas floral arrangements, Wilkinson is using “lots of amaryllis, lots of berries, anemones and ranunculus, burgundy orchids, lots of sticks of contorted hazel for different texture, and Christmas foliage.”

Even though she has four children, Wilkinson will make time on Christmas day to visit the hotel and check on her handiwork. “There is a real sense of celebration. The atmosphere is electric.”

Loughlin Druhan, director of culinary

“We take bets on it at Christmas, to see how many portions of turkey we sell,” says chef Loughlin Druhan, who as director of culinary is responsible for making sure the hotel’s approximately 145 guests booked in for a three-day stay from December 24th to 27th, or longer, are well fed. “Turkey is the number one choice, about 45 to 50 per cent of guests take the turkey and ham,” Druhan says of the Christmas day lunch orders.

The main meal of the day on December 25th is served in the ballroom. “We have learned that our guests like to come in their own time. It’s like a restaurant service that runs from 12.30pm to 4.30pm; although last year we had two guests that didn’t want to come and dine till 5.30 and that was fine for us. Two or three o’clock onwards tends to be the time people come.” Despite the anything is possible ethos, Druhan has never been asked for a room service Christmas lunch. This year, the menu has a choice of five dishes for starter, main course and dessert, with fillet beef, turbot, venison and cauliflower “steak” competing with the turkey and ham.

In the evening of the 25th, a buffet is available to those who still have an appetite. “We set up from about 6pm or 6.30pm, we find that the kids tend to eat at about six in the evening. We do a roast rib of beef, sugar pit bacon from Hannan Meats, some nice light dishes, and a salad buffet. We probably only do about half the amount of guests for the evening meal, people are quite full. We have a cheeseboard and charcuterie up there, so they maybe do a little bit of picking. It’s a very relaxed evening.”

And will guests, who will be spending from €3,200 per person for the three-day full board package, be able to partake of the traditional Christman sandwich? “We do have leftovers in the evening, so if someone did want to have one, they can.” On the 24th and 26th of December, guests have the choice of lunch in The Carriage House or a seasonally themed Champagne afternoon tea in The Gallery, as well as dinner on both nights in either the hotel’s one Michelin star restaurant, The Oak Room, or The Carriage House. An Airstream trailer in the courtyard, stocked with mulled wine, hot chocolate, mince pies, gingerbread cookies, is open noon to 8pm – “A nice little treat and a welcome to the Manor,” Druhan says.

And what is it like to work, behind the scenes, on Christmas day? “In the staff canteens we have festive Christmas lunch and dinner, with turkey and ham, Christmas puddings, and we do the Christmas hats and all that. Everybody is in a good mood.” Druhan has worked on Christmas day every year since he became a chef, with the exception of 2016, when Adare Manor was being remodelled. “But I have my first child on the way next year, so hopefully I’ll get to spend a bit of Christmas next year with the child.”

“Christmas is busy. Everybody’s got to work hard, but nobody is under too much pressure. And then you can actually get to enjoy it, which is nice.”

Brendan O’Connor, general manager

Playing Secret Santa might not be an aspiration that’s high on the wish list for anyone dreaming of working in high-end hospitality, but it’s a task that is taken seriously at Adare Manor, where about 25 young guests between the ages of three and 17 are booked in to spend Christmas this year.

“Some families are quite disciplined in what they give their children, they don’t want to over gift,” says Brendan O’Connor, the hotel’s general manager. “When it comes to Santa, the hotel would buy specific gifts for the children. We work quite hard on this and we can pick up from speaking to the parents at booking stage, was there any particular thing this year that they would enjoy, or they’d like. And sometimes the parents would say look, you know what, we agreed that they’re getting three things, so they’ll give us the gift they want our Santa to give to the child on the 24th.”

“We would have children we would know from over the past four or five years, so we know what they’ve received each year, so we won’t repeat it. We try and put some thought into it.”

The gift giving is specific to each family’s wishes and traditions, but the hotel staff play their part. “We would be working in the background. Sometimes the second car comes from Dublin and the gifts are in that. No one’s allowed see them, we have to take the gifts in.” Some family groups are allocated a spare room next to where they are staying, for Santa to make his deliveries. “We might have that prepped with all the gifts, and then somebody can say, `Oh, we think Santa has come but he’s actually come next door’.”

Despite the expense of spending Christmas in a five-star hotel, Adare Manor has a lot of repeat guests. “We’ve one particular family, a couple, and they don’t have any children of their own, but they love being around the Christmas spirit. They came the first year and that was it then, they fell into the magic of what we were doing here,” O’Connor says. “Quite a good number of our hotel guests over Christmas are either from hospitality or retail – businesses that are quite intense in December. And then they’re in the car on the 24th, ready to enjoy themselves, but they’ve worked damn hard on the way into it.”

Although the hotel has 104 rooms, only 70 are in use at Christmas. “We don’t fill the hotel, we pick this nice number where there’s quite a quiet feel to the place. And it’s intentional, because you want families to find areas that they can hang out in, and it’s not that busy.”

This will be the sixth Christmas at Adare Manor since it reopened after the redevelopment. “It took three years to get the look right,” O’Connor says of the festive decoration of the Manor. “Some hotels change theme every year, and we thought we were going to do that. But when we got to year three, we figured out we’ve got a kind of a look and feel that’s very classical. It was a case of lock it in, that’s our look.”

Every group or couple arriving at the hotel on the 24th, or earlier, will have a fully planned schedule for their stay, with their restaurant reservations and activities on the estate locked in. “That’s probably the bit that takes the longest, planning the whole itinerary of the three days. That starts usually around September, when reservations teams start reaching out individually to all the Christmas guests.

“There’s a rhythm to Christmas here now. I suppose we’re not apprehensive about it anymore. The first couple of Christmases, we were nervous, would it work? And the one thing we were most nervous about was the number of people, because the hotel could be 90 per cent full, but it doesn’t feel like that because guests go out and about, and they’re doing things. At Christmas, the car’s parked, and they’re on site here with you for three days.

“There’s a real sense of calm and tranquility on the days around Christmas. It’s a bubble that doesn’t exist at other times of the year. It’s really nice.”

Xavier Torne, executive pastry chef

The staff member most closely associated with the hotel’s gingerbread theme this year is executive pastry chef Xavier Torne, whose department had to find ways to incorporate it into the hotel’s afternoon tea, the cake trolley in the drawingroom, and the bedroom amenities, as well as the boxes of handmade chocolates. And then there is the handcrafted gingerbread village. “I was thinking about a village, now it’s a city,” he says.

Torne, who is from Barcelona and has been at Adare Manor since the reopening in 2017, doesn’t have Christmas pudding and cake as part of his own festive traditions, but he has had input from the hotel’s owners, whose family recipe for plum pudding is faithfully recreated. “It’s a slight bit different from your normal Christmas pudding. I personally think it is denser, there’s a lot of fruit, and there’s only a tiny bit of alcohol because he wouldn’t enjoy that.”

Torne says that JP McManus is not fond of desserts that are too sugary or rich, and that ties in with his own personal style of patisserie. “For me, it’s all about fruit and having the desserts a little bit lighter. I think coming from a warm country, we like things a little bit lighter, a little more fruit, perhaps a little less sugar. The last thing you want is feeling overwhelmed by all the sweetness.”

Adare Manor has its own chocolate room, near the kitchens, where chocolates are made by hand, for bedroom amenities, and for sale in the gift shop. “It all started from the family. They’re very keen on bringing gifts whenever they meet relatives or people they know; they like to give them something. We started to think, what if we can make chocolates in-house for gifting, as well as potentially for our retail shop, because until then we were just doing it for the Manor and The Carriage House. So we started developing recipes and sourcing packaging, and that’s how it all started.”

Next year, this operation will move to a cottage on the grounds, which will become a chocolate workshop and patisserie, open to guests to come and watch the process. For Christmas, the handmade chocolates will be available from the giftshop, in boxes of nine and 25. Residents checking in on the 24th will find a coffret of 72 chocolates in their rooms, as well as a tub of Quality Street and a copy of the RTÉ Guide, for a uniquely Irish take on festive essentials.