Castletown House in Co Kildare, said to have influenced the design of the White House, reopens to the public tomorrow. It is getting a new lease of life as a concert venue and cultural centre. Gemma Tiptontakes the tour with its staunchest defender, Desmond Guinness.
What should we do with our Great Irish Houses? The answer, from some, in the 1920s, was to burn them down. That might seem a little drastic these days.
The hard fact, as so many of their owners have discovered, is that few of the Great Houses are now viable financial entities. Whether land has been sold off through the profligacy or fecklessness of past generations, or simply because the economics of farming and land ownership have changed at the same time as costs of maintenance and restoration have gone sky high, many of the those left in charge of our finest architectural heritage have been struggling to find new ways to make ends meet.
Selling hinterlands for housing developments may disrupt boundary lines and vistas, but can produce a valuable cash injection, to waterproof a roof, for example. Some have turned to music to provide the funds. From the mega-gigs at Slane Castle, to the Electric Picnic at Stradbally and the Garden Party at Ballinlough, annual concerts and festivals are raising some necessary loot. So, too, is hosting weddings and turning the house over to paying guests. But these options can cause devastating wear and tear on the fabric of the house and its furnishings, while the installation of the requisite en-suite for every bedroom, complete with modern showers and plumbing fittings, can be a disaster in conservation terms.
There's a difference, of course, in whether the house is in private ownership, or has been purchased as a business venture. Recently we have seen a spate of people sticking on concrete and glass bedroom wings and turning the places into "luxury spa hotel destinations", which, while occasionally tasteful, can hardly be said to preserve our architectural heritage intact.
Then there's the "Powerscourt approach", whereby the shell of the house (which in this case was all that remained after an accidental fire in the 1970s) becomes a chi chi shopping and cappuccino emporium, with golf club on the side.
All of which means it has become high time that at least one of our Great Houses was conserved in a way that makes sense, both of its history, and of the way we live today - and that brings us to Castletown House.
That Castletown House, arguably Ireland's most important historic house, is standing at all is thanks to one man, Desmond Guinness. The story that he stepped in as bulldozers were getting set to demolish it is apocryphal. "I never heard that. It would take some bulldozer, don't you think? I wouldn't like to be the man driving it," he points out wryly. However, if it wasn't for the intervention of Guinness, at a time when the house had been empty for two years and vandals were stealing the lead from the roof, there wouldn't have been much worth preserving inside. "I always loved Castletown, above any other house," he says. "I never thought I should ever own it, although I only did for a few years, then I gave it to a foundation. It just is one of the most wonderful untouched houses in Ireland."
This "untouched house" was begun in 1722, by William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Parliament, and "wealthiest commoner in Ireland" (all his life he refused to take a title). Designed by Alessandro Galilei, and completed by Edward Lovett Pearce, the proportions are perfectly Palladian, and it is even said to have influenced the design of the White House in Washington DC.
Not only did Guinness save this beautiful house, he also had the foresight to acquire some of the contents. "I bought the chandeliers, and all the busts in the long gallery, furniture and Conolly family pictures. There is some furniture, not enough to furnish the whole house, but at least the wonderful chandeliers in the long gallery were in safe hands." The chandeliers in the long gallery are, indeed, wonderful.
Lady Louisa Lennox, who grew up in neighbouring Carton House, and who married Tom Conolly, heir to Castletown, when she was just 15, ordered them from Murano in Venice. While she was waiting the two years it took for their manufacture and delivery, she set about redecorating the gallery in blue to match them. "The chandeliers have arrived intact," she wrote in a letter, "they are the wrong blue for the room". But with two years spent painting pictures in the style of the recently rediscovered Pompeii on the walls, the blue of the room stayed as it was, and so did the chandeliers.
It was Lady Louisa who oversaw the addition of the two wings to Castletown, as well as the great staircase. She knocked through a 2ft thick wall downstairs to create the present dining room, although - not being an architect herself - she didn't know about structural walls, with the result that the room above has an alarmingly bowed floor. She also laid out the grounds, first writing to the famous British landscape designer Capability Brown to ask him to take on the job. "I haven't finished England yet," Brown wrote back.
Talk of chandeliers shipped from Italy, long galleries, and lords and ladies, makes one think of lives spent in luxury and ease, but that wasn't necessarily the case at Castletown. Guinness remembers the house being freezing in the winter, along with other hardships. "There was always a frightful shortage of water. A lot of people used to stay there for Horse Show week because they were a very horsey family. And you'd see a pipe going out of the window upstairs and into a bath, from which they could take buckets to flush the lavatories and things.
"There used to be a well in the stable yard that was fine in the winter," he continues, "but it would dry up in summer. There was also a 'ram' in the river that used the flow of the water to build up pressure, so that would give about half a pint to the tank at the top of the house - if it wasn't blocked up with a fish or something. It was incredibly precarious."
The residents of Castletown worked around these privations, of course, freezing and dying for a hot bath as they were.
"Hot baths were on Thursdays, because if they gave a dinner party it was always on a Thursday evening, and you'd see the governess coming down with her fur coat and her evening dress," Guinness remembers.
Listening to Guinness describe the house's recent past, you start to realise that history is a living thing, and that the conservation of a house such as Castletown should also mean a conservation of the sense of life and activity that would have always surrounded it.
David Byers of the OPW, which is now custodian of Castletown, agrees. "We're trying to conserve the building, but at the same time it has to breathe and be used," he says. "The thing is to give the building momentum." With that in mind, he has been working with project director Mary Heffernan, who has been general manager at Farmleigh, to create a mix of uses that will bring the house to life.
There will be a cafe, run by Claire Hanley, as well as a bookshop and produce shop. Cultural groups, such as the orchestra organisation, Camerata Ireland, and theatrical company The Performance Corporation will be housed here. A collaboration with NUI Maynooth among others will bring students in to work with the Castletown Research Centre. There will also be concerts and exhibitions. The landscape, including Lady Contin-Louisa's walk along the Liffey and the two-mile avenue to Conolly's Folly, are being restored as well. Heffernan and Byers are taking things slowly though, waiting to see how things go before putting the next phase into action, which will be finding a use for the former farmyard and stableyard. They want to stay true to what makes the building tick, but, as Heffernan notes "it still has to have a value in society, and we also want it to be a great day out."
Guinness, who founded the Irish Georgian Society (IGS), 50 years ago next year, to preserve Ireland's architectural heritage, has his own ideas about how best to look after our Great Houses. Castletown provided the headquarters for the IGS, and Guinness's first wife, Princess Magira, is buried under the central arch of her beloved Conolly's Folly, so Castletown is full of memory and meaning for him.
"The worst thing of all," he says, "is to have a golf course outside the windows. Apart from that it is very nice to leave these places alone. You need to bring them to life. At Castletown that's not very difficult. You have the wonderful long gallery where you can have 200 people seated, with the amazing view of the Folly and the parkland and the sun setting . . ."
The Festival of Music in Great Irish Houses was started "as one of the ways to make them live; the best way. It's not anything that's going to vulgarise the place."
Guinness returned recently to Castletown to see how work was progressing. "I've seen the front hall and the staircase, and they looked exactly the same," he says. And that, given his own deep love of genuine conservation, is probably one of the best compliments he can give.
Castletown House reopens to the public tomorrow. 01-6288252, www.heritageireland.ie