'Wellness centres' are springing up around the country, largely because of generous tax breaks. But who's going to stay in all of Ireland's spas, asks Catherine Cleary
You walk through the elegant entrance hall of the old house and into a stunning glass corridor that leads to a glass box with more corridors off it. Katie Melua is playing through such a pristine speaker system that she could be whispering in your ear. The effect is like having your ears nuzzled by a Labrador puppy: pleasant at first and then quite drippy.
There are layers of historical irony at Monart, a spa in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, that is the country's latest luxury hideaway. It is a refuge from everything that enables its customers to afford such an escape in the first place. Frazzled by the tiger? Come and lay your tired head on the scented cotton towels and, between treatments, curl up in a pod-shaped cubbyhole in the wall.
The original house was an 18th-century wedding present to the son of the county high sheriff and the daughter of the Jameson whiskey family. But the nuptial gift won't be hosting any weddings for the stressed-out descendants of the people who once worked the smallholdings around the big house. Hens and honeymooners are welcome, however. There will be no children. Instead, there will be towelling robes, a salt grotto, oils and mud, foot massages, and a darkened circular room designed to return you to the comfort of the womb.
In 2002, Monart was sold to Liam Griffin, a Wexford hotelier, after more than three and a half centuries in the Cookman family. Tall and narrow, the house stood on the landscape like a sandstone brick on its end, surrounded by overgrown gardens and thick forest. Now, although the original building houses two suites, the old house is primarily a gateway to the newly-built spa, a series of low-rise cedar-clad buildings in a two-winged curve around an ornamental pond and a beautiful garden designed by the Chelsea gold medal winner Mary Reynolds.
Griffin is himself a man in need of a spa break. Christmas Day was his only day off in the past two months. The builders were still putting the finishing touches as 2006 began, and he is aware that the hotel is one of the first of its kind to test the Irish market. Already, though, a London agent has been in touch with Griffin's hotel manager, to find out if paparazzi could get close enough to train their lenses on the window of the €1,000-a-night suite. The agent has not revealed who is behind the query, although some suspect it is the Beckhams.
Hotels and spa hotels, or "wellness centres", seem to be dropping out of the sky onto every other field and country house. Behind the transformation of the Irish hotel industry is the story of a multimillion-euro system of tax breaks. Investors can offset almost half of every euro they spend on hotels - from the hydro pools to the specially commissioned beds with 600-thread-per-square-inch sheets - against tax on their rental income in the Republic. When the incentives were introduced, they could offset it against any form of income, prompting senior lawyers to pile into the hotel investment market.
In 2002 Charlie McCreevy, as finance minister, extended the incentives for two years, but unease set in when it emerged that some millionaires were using them to avoid tax entirely. The scheme was soon amended, to write off the investment over 25 years instead of seven. In a startling picture of how actively tax planners had used the scheme, when its planning deadline approached, at the end of 2004, more than 200 applications for hotels were made in eight weeks, with a total of almost 15,000 bedrooms planned.
Griffin believes the tax breaks have brought a new kind of hotel to Ireland. "In years to come people will look back and wonder if Irish tourism is part of an international franchise. And will we lose the Irishness of it all when someone in New York picks plan A, B or C for a hotel to be built in the middle of Wexford?" Griffin has used local designers - Stephen Carr Architects - local builders and, in Reynolds, a local garden designer.
His sporting background, as a former Wexford hurling manager, makes him believe that the spa industry could appeal to a wider audience. "It has a very female orientation, but the English rugby team take regular breaks in a spa hotel. The biggest thing in sport is rest and rejuvenation; otherwise you burn out players."
The 59-year-old businessman works out three times a week, has never had a facial - "with a face like this it's a facelift I need" - but would have a massage. He knows he's entering an increasingly crowded market. "Spas are being added now like confetti to the backs of buildings. But we went for an adult destination spa. Long term we want to develop a model, and this is our interpretation of what it might be."
Because of a tax incentive that is available for extensions to existing hotels, many established venues have added spas. At the K Club, in Co Kildare, the epicentre of Ryder Cup frenzy, the spa sets out to "bring you on a journey where even time seems to hush". Bought last year by Michael Smurfit and property developer Gerry Gannon, the hotel and its spa promise to send you back to the day job "filled with stillness".
Griffin says the hotel tax breaks were good for the economy and drove the building industry, "but you have a situation where tax breaks went to people who made a lot of money in a lot of different fields and are now bringing in international franchises. Then you had the great hoteliers, who do not have same access to capital".
Griffin, who has been in the hotel trade for 30 years, was left with the choice of moving with the tax breaks or getting out of the business. He brought in a building firm as his partner on Monart and targeted a niche market. "There are way too many hotels in Ireland. You have to ask: When does building become pollution?"
The figures are staggering. Back in the mid 1960s Ireland had 3,500 en-suite hotel bedrooms. There will be 50,000 by the end of this year, more than half of those built in the past decade. The good news is that occupancy rate for last year looks healthy, at up to 65 per cent (compared with just under 60 per cent in 2004).
The bad news is that US tourists, once the golden geese of the Irish hotel trade, have been slow to return since September 11th, and other long-haul trade seems to be slipping, too. "The hotels under pressure are the rural small properties," says John Power, chief executive of the Irish Hotels Federation. "Outside of Dublin more than 70 per cent of rooms are taken up by the domestic market. That's weekend breaks, corporate activity, weddings and other family celebrations."
In other words, the wealth created by the boom is keeping most Irish hotels in business. Are there now too many hotels? "If the Irish economy keeps going the way it is, then the economy will keep pace with the development."
The tax breaks brought a new approach to the hotel trade: as in the case of the Four Seasons in Dublin, the building work is completed by one set of businessmen, then an international operator leases the hotel as part of its chain.
Power believes the tax breaks worked well. "You had to have the person with the capital, who took the risks. Without them you wouldn't have had the growth of the hotel sector. The whole face of the industry has changed. Tax reliefs were a big part of that. Overall, I think it was an example of tax breaks creating good value out there through competition. The B&B sector is very important for the experience of people getting close to their customer, but there's room for everybody."
The leisure centre and spa attraction was one way to keep Irish hotels attractive to domestic customers who might otherwise be lured to the sun by cheap flights. "Then you have other imaginative ways of attracting people, like cooking schools or art or painting holidays. Family-owned properties really have to be creative."
Some parts of Ireland have been quick to embrace the trend. Kerry, for example, has become a "wellness county", with a spa or three in every major town. These havens of pan-pipe music and patchouli cater for Irish holidaymakers in need of escape. But it is the urban Ireland they run from that overseas visitors are coming to experience in increasing numbers. According to the Irish Hotels Federation, overseas visitors last year spent almost a third of their "holiday bed nights" in the Dublin region, compared with a fifth in 1999.
That means rural hotels have been attracting fewer and fewer foreign tourists since 1999. "Three million bed nights have been lost to the western seaboard area over the past five years due to a decline of 1.8 million holiday bed nights from Britain and approximately one million from mainland Europe," the federation warned the Government in a pre-Budget submission.
To avail of their full tax breaks, hotel developers were to have laid their final bricks by this summer, but with so many projects under way, and the building trade stretched to the limit, that was proving impossible for many. Brian Cowen, the Minister for Finance, has given them breathing space by changing the rules. Now they can offset three-quarters of the costs against tax if the building is finished by the end of 2007, or half of their costs on projects that do not finish until December 2008.
After that the market will decide the long-term health of Ireland's temples of wellness. Liam Griffin hopes the boom will continue to create a trail of customers seeking refuge. "It's a dream," he says, "a well-thought-out dream."
HATS OFF?
They are called swirl mirrors, the spokesman for Monogram Hotels says firmly. But, yes, he concedes, everybody calls them the Camilla mirrors, because they bear a striking resemblance to one of Camilla Parker Bowles's wedding hats, with their surrounds of sharply twisted gold feathers.
The G Hotel, in Galway, has generated an astounding amount of interest, not least because its cartoonishly exuberant interior was designed by Philip Treacy, the county's royal milliner. It has been described as the kind of place Willy Wonka would design as his home.
Monogram Hotels has two ventures; its other is the D, in Drogheda. The quiet man behind the hype, Galway property developer and former teacher Gerry Barrett, is lodging plans for a hotel in Dublin, too: Hatch Hall, on Hatch Street, which until two years ago was a hall of residence for Jesuit students. His company also intends to turn the former Bow Street magistrates court, in London, into a hotel, and it is targeting other European cities.
The 104-bedroom D opened last year on the site of a former margarine factory. Like the G, the Drogheda hotel is the tax-break element of a housing, leisure and retail development. Unlike many developers that have availed of hotel tax breaks, Barrett's company has become the operator as well as the owner of the complex.
Could the group suffer from oversupply? "I think, with the two hotels we have at the moment, the G is a niche end of the market, with a certain pitch and standards of service for which there is not much competition. In the west the idea of a five-star hotel is a castle surrounded by a rolling golf course and parkland. We're doing the five-star urban-hotel experience. The D is ideally positioned, because the northeast is undersupplied in four-star hotels."
How does the hotel industry feel about developers becoming hoteliers? "I think it's good, and we bring a different approach compared to the Irish hotel trade, which is quite traditional."