The most shocking feature of the cluster of Carrickmines houses sold in Dublin last month for some £1 million each was not the price paid nor the speed with which the properties were reserved, but the unrelieved banality of their design. There is, however, little new about this; traditionally, new money has been made with flair but spent without imagination.
More than a century and a half ago, Ruskin wrote in The Poetry of Architecture that "taste is the slave of memory"; but new money has no past and therefore no collection of memories on which to call. Instead, as Ruskin noted, it usually attempts to imitate what has already been achieved, with results that are "the most baneful and the most un-intellectual".
Here lies an explanation for the term nouveaux riches always carrying connotations of disparagement. Entering the English language during the Napoleonic Wars, it was already being used by Maria Edgeworth in 1813 to describe the wealthy merchants of Manchester and Liverpool. But the snobbery inspired by new money goes back much further; it can be seen during the early 18th century in the Duc de Saint Simon's pettifogging distinction between the truly aristocratic noblesse de l'epee and the noblesse de robe whose origins usually lay in commerce.
And it continues to thrive today, as witnessed by Michael Jopling's remark - relayed to the public courtesy of Alan Clarke's published diaries - that his fellow Tory minister Michael Heseltine was the kind of man who had to buy his own furniture. Of course, all money begins shiny and only acquires the patina of respectability through time and tenacity. And although Joe Mordaunt Crook tends to concentrate on late 19th and early 20th-century England (with occasional excursions to Scotland for the shooting), much of what he has to say applies just as much to this country in both its past and present forms. After all, ever since the first Normans settled here, Ireland has offered a comfortable home to the nouveaux riches.
Many of our grandest houses were originally built with newly-minted money: Lyons by Lord Cloncurry, the son of a wealthy blanket manufacturer; Castletown by the self-made William Conolly; and Russborough by the first Earl of Milltown whose father, a precursor of the Guinness dynasty, had been a successful brewer. Crook enumerates many other examples of new money houses in late 19th-century Britain, perhaps rather too many (indeed, if there was a criticism to be made of his book, it would be the author's propensity to demonstrate his erudition by running to lists). What seems to have occurred since the 18th century is an erosion of nouveau riche confidence in its own judgement and a corresponding increase in conservative taste to the point where the latest generation (viz. those Carrickmines homes) exhibits no creativity at all.
"It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty," the acerbic Margot Asquith remarked, adding "Money has never yet bought imagination." Certainly, the manner in which new money is spent, the entertainments on which it is squandered and the houses for which it pays are now entirely predictable, having barely altered for more than 100 years. The nouveaux riches love to ape the gentry of former centuries and although land has now lost much of its commercial currency, possession of a country estate is still perceived to be de rigueur once income passes the multi-million pound mark.
CROOK shows how, in the 19th century, new money came to prefer the safety of classical architecture above all other forms and this remains true of today's Irish nouveaux riches. Castlemartin, Lyons, Charleville, Abbeyleix, Stackallan: all are classically-designed country houses now owned by members of Ireland's new rich club; other than acting as clear statements of wealth, they serve little purpose, since such buildings can no longer be financially supported by the estates of which they were once the centrepiece. New money rarely takes the initiative; it follows established modes and seems almost embarrassed about the dynamism with which it has been created - hence the tendency to copy old money's style.
Unlike the latter, however, new money always likes its creature comforts, and customarily demands the highest standards of overt luxury; after staying at the Rothschild mansion of Waddesdon in 1885, Henry James dryly remarked "the gilded bondage of this gorgeous place will last me for a long time." While Crook concentrates almost exclusively (and fascinatingly) on architecture, the persistent drive towards consensus in nouveaux riches expenditure may also be seen in other areas such as sports (racing, hunting, polo for the more energetic, golf for the more sedate) and art collecting (in this country, early 20th century Irish painters and, the hallmark of every newly-enriched Irish collector, Jack B. Yeats). In Dublin, new money clusters together in the Dalkey/Killiney area as though seeking reassurance in numbers; like London's Carlton House Terrace in the mid-19th century, Dublin's Sorrento Terrace is now millionaire's row.
"Disguise it as we may, wealth is the governing force in our social system," wrote the commentator T.H.S. Escott in 1879. The same may - and has - been said of Ireland today. There is remarkably little difference between the nouveaux riches of late Victorian London described by Crook and those of contemporary Dublin; expenditure among both groups may be summarised as lavish but uninspired. Beatrice Webb's comment after visiting a nouveau riche house in the early part of this century comes to mind. "There was a good deal of taste," she noted, "and all of it bad".
Robert O Byrne is an Irish Times staff journalist