Ballyfin House in Co Laois, 'Ireland's grandest neoclassical building', is being restored and transformed from a school into a hotel, writes Mary Leland
There's a Xanadu gleam in Jim Reynolds's eye as he walks the marble halls of Ballyfin House in Co Laois. "Is it going to be too grand?" he responds to an irresistible question. "I've got over feeling grand, you can get quite used to it!" I wonder, all the same, as we stand under the scaffolding in the hall that introduces the marvellous enfilade flowing through the centre of the house, whether this restoration and hotel project isn't creating something of a fantasy world. "Well, it is, but the house can speak for itself," says the CEO of Ballyfin Demesne Ltd. "Perhaps it was a fantasy world from the beginning. For me, it's as if I've died and gone to heaven. I get to do all this, to indulge the idea of a fantastic house, grounds and gardens, and I'm reasonably confident that I know how it all should look and how it should be done."
His confidence is understandable as he lists those who have the doing of it. Cornerstone Construction of Cobh are the main contractors, the principal architect is Jane Kennedy of the UK firm Purcell-Miller-Tritton, with conservation architect John O'Connell of Dublin as an associate. Kennedy's CV includes her roles as English Heritage Commissioner and surveyor of the fabric of Ely Cathedral. Among O'Connell's many prestigious briefs was his collaboration with Richard Wood on the original restoration of Fota House in Cork. That island mansion was produced by Sir Richard Morrison and his son William Vitruvius in 1826, by which time the pair had completed their work on Ballyfin, where they had been invited by Sir Charles Coote to put manners, so to speak, on the original design by Dominic Madden of Galway. The link between Fota and Ballyfin is visibly enhanced by the decorative influence described by architectural historian Edward McParland of Trinity College Dublin, who traces at Ballyfin the Moorish imprint of another Corkman, James Cavanagh Murphy, author of the enormously influential Arabian Antiquities of Spain, published posthumously (and at a reputed cost of £10,000) in 1815.
WHILE IT'S NOT really a case of money being no obstacle at Ballyfin, details of this renewal sit nicely with the motto of the founding Coote family: Coute que Coute or "cost what it may". Translating this as "whatever needs to be spent will be spent", Jim Reynolds adds that the spending is very carefully judged. "There is a budget," he insists, pointing to the kerbs edging parts of the garden as only concrete copies of those of 1820. But there's an apologetic hint in his voice, as if he is aware of a very slight deviation from the attitude suggested by McParland in his Country Life essays of 1973. Nowhere, McParland writes, did the Morrisons get the chance to express heraldic symbolism more elaborately than at Ballyfin, where the whole house is a proclamation of the Coote family motto: "Only a similar, but now alas impractical approach, could ensure the safety of Ireland's grandest neoclassical house."
Hardly impractical after all; Ballyfin Demesne Ltd, with Woody Clark as its overall project manager, has caught this house at the time of its greatest need - despite the efforts of the Patrician Brothers, whose school here will close in 2009, of the Heritage Council and the Irish Georgian Society, it was, as Jim Reynolds says, "on its last legs". With a 10 per cent stake in the company, Reynolds is its chief executive; the chairman, with 85 per cent, is businessman Fred Krehbiel of Chicago (and Kerry), while the remaining 5 per cent is in the hands of James Hepworth. Established to fulfil Krehbiel's desire to have a first-class hotel in Ireland, the consortium bought Ballyfin in 2002, partly because it was the best intact demesne left in Ireland.
There are 614 acres, complete with 18th-century woodlands, follies, paths, grottos, water courses, forge, slaughterhouse, dairy, walled gardens, aviary, and still-thriving estate church. This integrity of design and of hospitable intention is to be preserved. There will be no golf course at this hotel, no passing trade, but instead a sense of privacy and of occasion; a country house set in an Arcadian vista and built for entertaining as much as for family grandeur.
It is a grandeur without grandiloquence; the charm of Ballyfin is that after all these years it is at ease with itself. The somewhat stern 13-bay entrance front, with its pillared portico and its trim of repaired and replaced wreaths, gives way to a modest hall with a second-century Roman mosaic inserted in the floor.
The Gold Drawing Room, used to portray Richmond House for the television adaptation of Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats, is being relined with blue silk panels between the ornamental mirrors gilded, like the ceiling stucco, to a blissful gloss and incorporating repairs supervised by the workshops at Cliveden Conservation in England. But like the delightful morning-room with its light tracery of plasterwork, this is almost domestic in terms of the excitement of the rooms beyond. The inner hall, with its cantilevered staircase and upper galleries interrupted by niches, is the introduction to the extraordinary vista created in what McParland calls "the heightened drama of unexpected enfilade to right and left". This sequence follows from the hall to the saloon, where the fake roundels painted in for the latest of the many filmings of The Count of Monte Cristo are now being painted out. Credited as the greatest technical achievement of Irish decorative plasterwork, the coved ceiling, lit from a lantern of stained glass above, looks down not only on the marble fireplace, but on the inlaid floor, which McParland describes as "incomparable". Then comes the rotunda with its star-clustered double dome and Ionic columns, and after that the library, a surviving and splendid testimony to Madden's work.
Enclosed by a high stone wall that is more than four miles long, Ballyfin began with the native O'Moores, who were replaced by the Crosbies; in turn the Crosbies were replaced by the Poles. William Wellesley-Pole, brother of the Duke of Wellington and reputedly one of the most unpopular men in Ireland (and England, for that matter), sold the estate to Sir Charles Henry Coote in 1812.
While Sir Charles lived there for the next 50 years, he employed Murdoch Campbell as his steward; Campbell's tombstone celebrates his genius and resource in the design and construction of "all the works of beauty and solidity in this demesne, and in the deer park, farm, lake and buildings". When the Cootes left in 1928, the estate became a school, which is to be transferred to nearby Mountrath next year. Although the Patricians used the house both for classrooms and living quarters, they left it physically almost untouched and cared for its wonders with an unusual sensitivity, storing what was not needed so well that even the farmyard clock of 1811, by Bewleys of Mountrath, can be put back in the phase-two development of the farm, coach-yard and stable buildings.
NOW THE ALMOST forensic adherence to the decorative template guiding all the work at the house has achieved a kind of friendly magnificence. The Coote family pictures have been bought back to Ballyfin, although there are occasional dilemmas, such as where to install Lady Coote's bath, a basin of Carrara marble built on the lines of a sarcophagus. There are 20,000 volumes waiting to be returned to the library, which makes up one entire side elevation broken by a great colonnaded bay; the flooring there, of bog-oak, satinwood, purpleheart and mahogany, has been identified by the company now repairing the floors at Buckingham Palace as composed by Seddons of London, who worked for George IV. The spaced bookshelf alcoves include one that reveals itself as a door into the Turner conservatory, which, lovingly cared for by the late Brother Joseph, is now being repaired in London.
All the fireplaces work, the brass uprights on the staircase balustrade gleam anew, and throughout the house the double doors open on alluring spaces where the windows offer views of the lake, the woods and of the distant midland hills. Along with a tree-planting scheme (50 acres of oaks already), there is the necessary transformation of the basement, complete with kitchens, sculleries, pantries and a wine cellar. Upstairs, the vaulted bedroom corridors - at least one of which has an inner lining of turf - lead to rooms that have been modernised with the same painstaking attention to detail that characterises all the work here.
An advisory committee watching over the progress at Ballyfin since 2002 includes Brother Maurice Murphy, past-pupil, teacher and for more than 10 years something like the curator or guardian spirit of the house he has known since boyhood. Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin; Darina Allen; and members of the Coote family are also among those overseeing, for example, the work of CF Quality Decorators and interior designer Colin Orchard.
"Ballyfin is not a toy," insists Reynolds, who expects the hotel to open in 2010. "It has to earn its living. But it won't be a 'quick gin and tonic' kind of place. It was designed to give the illusion that life is perfect, and that's the illusion we want to offer to our guests."