The Ballyfin estate in Co Laois was designed on a palatial scale.Now, its owners, the Patrician Brothers, want to sell up. Will the estate ever be restored to its former grandeur? asks Robert O'Byrne
What is to happen to Ballyfin? The Co Laois estate, including a building described by historian Mark Bence-Jones as being "the largest and most lavishly appointed early 19th-century classical house in Ireland" is currently for sale, for a price in the region of €9.52 million.
But whoever agrees to purchase the place will have to spend as least as much money again on its restoration, because Ballyfin today suffers from an abundance of problems. Indeed, these are so numerous and so daunting that the property in its present state encapsulates the difficulties that continue to hang over all Irish country houses.
Since 1927, Ballyfin has been owned by the Patrician Brothers, who run a successful secondary school from the premises. However, the order's numbers have dropped substantially of late, and there are now only four members living in Ballyfin, two of them retired from teaching. Trying to look after the daily upkeep of an enormous house designed to be maintained by a battery of servants has defeated the Patricians, so last autumn they decided to put the estate on the market, albeit at a higher price than the £10,000 paid for Ballyfin 75 years ago.
But the reasons why the place's former owners were then obliged to sell are not so terribly different from those which have led the Patrician Brothers to prepare for their own departure in the next few years: a culture which places relatively little value on its architectural heritage and offers scarcely any support for those attempting to keep large houses intact.
Ballyfin is certainly larger than most. In its present form, the main block was constructed between 1821 and 1826, but on the site of an earlier building and at the heart of an 18th- century demesne which remains largely as first planned. The estate had been owned by William Wellesley-Pole, a brother of the Duke of Wellington, and it was he and his forebears who laid out the estate, including the magnificent 36-acre man-made lake which lies in front of the house.
In 1812, Wellesley-Pole sold Ballyfin to Sir Charles Coote, premier baronet of Ireland, who soon decided to replace the late 18th- century building with something altogether more splendid. And the house into which he eventually moved really is extraordinarily grand, designed on a palatial scale such as has rarely been seen in this country, but is more commonly found among the princely residences of Italy or Russia.
Coote's original choice of architect was the relatively unknown Dominick Madden, who would later design the Roman Catholic cathedral in Tuam, Co Galway. His principal legacy at Ballyfin is the bow-fronted library that concludes the south-west wing of the house; but by 1822 Madden had been superseded by one of Ireland's most successful architects during the first half of the 19th century, Richard Morrison, who worked on the project with his son, William Vitrivius.
From the exterior, their work can seem somewhat austere, the long, 13-bay, two-storey grey facade relieved only by an enormous, if shallow, pedimented portico of four Ionic columns. However, it is the interior of Ballyfin which constitutes the house's glory, thanks to the extravagant scale of the main rooms and the lavish quantity of decoration applied to almost every available surface within them.
A relatively restrained entrance hall features a coffered ceiling and a floor inset with mosaic brought here from Rome. This leads into one of Ballyfin's finest spaces, the top-lit saloon with coved ceiling encrusted in grandiose plasterwork and an inlaid wooden floor of similar intricacy. At either end of the saloon are screens of columns and this feature proves to be one of the leitmotifs of Ballyfin.
Similar screens, in each case deploying a different-coloured marble, can also be found in the dining-room and the library, while a series of eight Siena columns run around the walls of the top-lit rotunda, another survival from Madden's original design. As in the saloon, the rotunda boasts 19th-century plasterwork of a complexity unsurpassed elsewhere in Ireland.
The white drawing-room, believed to date from the 1840s, is decorated in the Louis Quinze style with gilt ornamentation, including several full-length chinoiserie mirrors with their original glass, smothering the walls.
Every room in Ballyfin displays evidence that exceptional effort was taken over the house's design, whether the recessed mahogany bookcases in the library or the crisp plasterwork at each corner of the breakfast room's coved ceiling. The staircase hall, again top-lit, with cantilevered steps running up three sides of the space to a screened gallery, is another remarkable room which might have been transported from a Roman palazzo. On the first floor, two corridors lead to suites of bedrooms, because Ballyfin was a house built to hold large numbers of people.
But those numbers are no longer to be found, and most of the bedrooms have been either closed or now serve for storage. Some of them are barely habitable, because in recent years the house has suffered from water seeping through the roof and into the building. A corner of the ground-floor white drawing-room, for example, shows evidence of serious damage from this problem. Some years ago, the Patrician Brothers started to appeal for support in the maintenance of Ballyfin and, since January 2000, the State has provided €1.27 million towards restoring the roof.
That area is now stabilised, but according to conservation architect Paul Arnold, who has been supervising the project, more costly work is still required on the parapets and corbels. Then money will need to be spent elsewhere on the building, taking care of those sections which have been ruined by damp as well as rescuing such features as the saloon's marquetry floor, areas of which have become dislodged, and the unique glass and iron conservatory dating from around 1850 and believed to have been designed by Richard Turner.
Arnold estimates that a minimum of €5 million would be necessary to secure the house's future, although much more might be spent. And the grounds are also suffering from a shortage of funds for their upkeep: trees need to be thinned or felled, while other sections of the woodlands should be replanted; the grottoes and follies, including a 19th- century "medieval" observation tower, are suffering; and one of the neo-classical gate lodges is almost derelict.
Remarkable and deserving of support as Ballyfin may be, the question must be asked: who can or will come to its salvation? While the Patrician Brothers have to be commended for their preservation of the main house and park, the demands of running a large school meant that, over the past three-quarters of a century, they have added a considerable number of other buildings, none of which can be claimed to have any architectural merit. Indeed, the construction of a number of large blocks necessitated the destruction of Ballyfin's handsome stableyard.
ANYONE taking on the estate has to contend with these additions and the problem of what to do with them, the ideal scenario being that they are demolished and the house left entirely clear of later accretions. Brother James O'Rourke, provincialate of the order here, says he would be keen for whoever buys Ballyfin to respect its character and ensure its restoration. But that would be a horrendously expensive business and explains why the estate's future is now so precarious.
In Co Laois, the local authority is keen that the State - which has, after all, already invested €1.27 in the house's roof - might quickly agree to acquire the whole place. The county director of services, Louis Brennan, argues that Ballyfin could serve a huge variety of purposes, ranging from a national museum of architecture to a home for a decentralised Arts Council. He also suggests that theestate should remain a centre of learning, whether by acting as a cultural academy/artists' retreat, as a base for sporting activities in the grounds and the adjacent Slieve Bloom mountains, or even as a secondary school. He is seeking a meeting between himself and other members of Laois Co Council, both elected and employed, and Silé de Valera, the minister whose department is responsible for deciding whether the State should buy Ballyfin.
Despite Brennan's enthusiasm, however, in the present economic climate it seems unlikely that public funds will be found for the estate, especially when so much more would have to be spent bringing it back to perfect condition. And Ballyfin poses specific challenges arising from the nature of the house's sumptuous decoration. This is a mansion which demands grandeur; when owned and occupied by the Coote family, it was filled with marble statuary and paintings by the likes of Lancret, Greuze and Murillo. Ballyfin's furniture was so splendid that it was believed to have been originally made for George IV when he was Prince of Wales. The State simply does not possess such material nor, with so many other demands being made at the moment on the exchequer, the funds to acquire it.
And yet, desperate as Ballyfin's plight must seem, there is, remarkably, a possible resolution because, according to Brother James, contact has been made with a potential private buyer. This will certainly not satisfy Louis Brennan or the other interested parties in Co Laois, but the retention of Ballyfin in private hands ought not necessarily to be considered regrettable. During the 1990s, a number of other important Irish country houses, including Abbeyleix in the same county, Castletown Cox in Co Kilkenny and Stackallan in Co Meath, were meticulously restored by new owners. Perhaps the same could now happen at Ballyfin; and, given that a large sum of public money has already gone into saving the building, the State will retain a certain say in what happens.
Private ownership of Ballyfin may not be the ideal, but right now it looks likely to provide its only chance of survival.