In the boudoir of Fota House, a sun-trapped butterfly, having spent the winter in these empty rooms, rattles against the window-pane. I think of Elizabeth Bowen's elegy for houses such as these: "Out of reach, the windows down to the ground open upon the purple beeches and lazy hay, the dear weather of those rooms in and out of which flew butterflies."
I have been in this room twice before. First, when the conservation architect, John O'Connell, and Richard Wood, the Cork businessman and farmer who initiated the restoration of the house as the home of his collection of Irish landscape paintings, had brought the house radiantly back to life. Their collaboration was so successful that Fota won the UNESCO award as European Museum of the Year in 1984.
The 700-acre estate had been bought by University College, Cork, after the death in 1975 of the Dorothy Bell, the last of the Smith-Barry family to live at Fota.
The driving force behind the acquisition was Professor Tom Raftery, who recognised the property's potential value as an extra-mural campus for the college's dairy, agriculture, botany and zoology departments, as well as a public cultural and recreational amenity. Little of this potential was realised by UCC, although the Royal Zoological Society in Dublin joined Raftery in the development of the important and successful Fota Wildlife Park.
In 1987, UCC's governing body took the bitterly divisive decision to sell the demesne, with the exception of the wildlife park, to what became a series of foreign investment interests. Richard Wood departed, a golf-club - shortly to be the venue of the Murphy's Irish Open - was built in the parkland, the house was closed and when I saw this room for the second time, extinction seemed to be only a breath away.
The lathe-and-plaster walls were shredding, the doves, projecting optimistic garlands from their moulded wreaths, were occluded by the dust thickening the cornices. Warped blinds betrayed the windows, floorboards and panelling were separated by thickening spores of dry rot, a gilded bird-cage lay on its side in a corner, its little grilled door rusting to death.
Yet, if the modern history of Fota House is one of promises broken, it is also one of promises kept, of faith and endurance and, within the house itself, the unpolished secrets of survival.
When Fota opens to the public later this year - after a succession of private functions which began with a gathering of the American Bary family on May 21st - the glamour of its public revival will disguise the private loyalties, angers, and persistence which brought the building to this resurrection.
Not for the public either are the re-knitted ribbon-lathes, the hidden buttresses, the fire-proofing layered between ceiling and floor, the scarf-jointed repairs, the stainless steel replacing the rotted cast-iron beam which, buried in the portico, was cracking the stone and crushing the Ionic heads of the columns in the hall.
At Fota, this secret life is cloaked in patterns of decoration, some restrained, some astounding in their fecund detail, some depending on the light from the long windows to show their richness of parquetry and marble, their embodiment of spatial sequences.
"For me," says architect John Cahill of the OPW, "the house works the way a piece of music works. The rooms flow harmoniously into one another, and it's possible to read the construction patterns in the actual building work itself, like a score."
Leading the restoration team this time around, Cahill explains how buildings move: there are thrusts and counter-thrusts, pressures and pushes, cracks which have to be stitched, dry rot which breathes and seeds itself, arches which spring from brackets - inner activity stretching from cellar to skylight.
In a cramp removed from one of the chimneys, the iron seems to rust in layers, swelling to three times its original thickness and causing a kind of curvature in the stone stacks. The exquisitely painted ceilings, the arched bedroom corridors, the density and detail of the plasterwork, the way in which gilding defines a room, beginning with the bosses on the shutters, advancing to a wall arch, flaring in the deep pelmets above the windows and pointing the cartoons and meticulous, five-layer ceiling borders until it fades in stencilled tendrils around each corner - all these details, minute or immense, govern the impact on the public eye.
But behind them lies the work of centuries. The technology of restoration is a modern science to which old practices adhere; methods, as well as materials, are recovered in a traffic from generation to generation.
As he traces the insignia of a mason or a joiner, Cahill says the £3 million-plus budget allowed modern craftsmen and women almost enough time to emulate the skills their own work was uncovering. How a hinging mechanism can work to conceal itself, how a hatch lies hidden in the architrave of a kitchen door and how, here in this romantically garlanded boudoir, the doors hung on the concave wall would probably have been steamed and pressed rather than cut to the curve - these are to be learned, not mysteries of historical architecture. And those working on Fota now have found the pride to leave their own imprint so that, in 10 years' time or so, they will bring children or grandchildren here and say: "I did that."
THE Barrys, Barrymores and Smith-Barrys came to Cork with the Anglo-Norman invasion in the Welsh persons of Philip de Bari and his brother, Gerald, otherwise known as Giraldus Cambrensis. Philip settled at nearby Barryscourt Castle, and when the family later moved to Castlelyons, a sporting lodge was built at Fota, then an island close to the main Cobh road.
In the 1820s, John Smith-Barry commissioned the remodelling of the five-bay lodge as the centrepiece of an ornamental (but very efficient) demesne; the architects were Sir Richard Morrison and his son, Vitruvious, also responsible, in Ireland, for Ballyfin and Kilruddery. Typically, everything at Fota, from gate-lodges to kennel-man's house, was designed as part of a coherent rural ideal, the house itself sitting in a shallow valley of trees.
That cohesion may never be achieved again, but the Fota Trust, which has managed the house, arboretum and gardens since 1987, has honoured its pledge, even through the most despondent of recent years. Through it all, the chairman, Bill Watts, former Provost of Trinity College, and the secretary, Tom Raftery, maintained their commitment. D·chas, the Heritage Service, have taken charge of the gardens and arboretum (both open to the public) and the restored orangery completes the axis travelling through the ornate staircase hall to the heart of the arboretum. The National Museum is to help furnish the public rooms; interpretation is in the hands of Robin Wade and Partners and the newly-appointed fund-raiser, Catriona Hogan, is charged with collecting another £2 million.
Much remains to be done: there are 76 useful rooms in Fota, and acres of orchards and walled kitchen gardens, where mildewed cards in the potting sheds still proclaim the success of Mrs Bell with delphiniums, sweet pea, and sea-kale. The arboretum is evidence she was a notable plantswoman; the little notices from the Munster Agricultural Society suggest a more intimate scale.
Here in this sunlit budoir, we talk of the kitchen suite, with its game larder and salting sinks and of the relief that the cantilever stone staircase showed a deflection of less than one millimetre when weight-tested. As John Chill lists the teams of contractors and consultants gathered from Cork, and around the island, Britain and elsewhere for this project, he remembers that the best time to see the effect of the external render on the walls of the house is at sunset, or on a wet day, he says, when you can see the colour in the old lime wash. We stand under the stained-glass demi-lune of this little boudoir where all the decoration speaks of its anticipation, in 1899, of a happy marriage.
Outside under the purple beeches, giraffes sway into the distance; he opens the sash to release the butterfly into the weather of the park.