Who lives in a house like this?
A large set of hand-forged gates, ornately decorated with galvanised fern leaves that creep up their posts, featuring intricately detailed croziers, unfurl to reveal a magically landscaped spot in the space beyond.
The ferns are the clue to the owner – Billy Alexander, the multi gold medal-winning gardener, who has just won his third gold medal at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show – and who lives in Kells Bay House and Gardens, at the end of this secluded drive.
Located about 15km west of Glenbeigh on Co Kerry’s Iveragh peninsula, the property includes a Victorian house and a subtropical botanical garden and grounds that overlook Dingle Bay. A river runs through it and, along with the waterfall, the rushing water provides a soundtrack to the lush greenscape. On the shores of the Wild Atlantic Way, the 60-acre property has access to a secluded beach and is surrounded by mountains on every other side.
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Chelsea winner
These and other Chelsea Flower Show awards are displayed proudly on the walls in the diningroom. Set into cards, the medals themselves have to be paid for – he thinks they cost about £150 each.
On this same gallery wall are photos of him receiving one of the golds from the late Queen Elizabeth II back in 2018. She’s wearing a sunset pink opera coat. He’s sporting a smile as wide as the Atlantic that crashes below the house. There are photos too, on the walls, of her son King Charles, who presented Alexander with this year’s gold medal.
A watercolour by the late Pauline Bewick hangs on another of the walls, commissioned by Alexander, and botanical prints from specimens in the garden, illustrated beautifully by Susan Sex, cover the entrance hall walls and stairwell and are also in every bedroom.
This is a plantsperson’s retreat, with 60 acres of grounds and gardens to explore.
The driveway is lined with mature trees soaring 100 feet up into the air. Scots pines, Douglas firs and rhododendron, fashionable in Victorian times, were set as a wind belt by an earlier owner of the property – previously called Hollymount Cottage – possibly Rowland Ponsonby Blennerhassett, Home Rule MP for Co Kerry between 1872 and 1885. It was he who established what is now called the ladies’ walled garden, adjacent to the front of the house, reportedly for his wife Lady Mary. Blennerhassett also extended the property and renamed it Kells Bay House.
The property includes a main house and other own-door annexes. Virginia creeper climbs the front of the property. A terrace of pink sandstone runs from the front steps down to a cafe area.
The porch has an entrance on either side, one to the east and the other to the west, to try and keep out of the prevailing winds. The porch and entrance hall have been turned into one long space that extends to about six metres (20 feet), and leads through a door to the main staircase.
The public spaces of the house feature dado-level panelling throughout, all painted a warm sandy white called Boathouse by Colourtrend. The walls above are coated in soft serene colours, all by the Irish paint company.
Life on our planet
Alexander believes the first tree fern on the property was planted in the 1890s, the so-called mother of all the tree ferns that now inhabit what is termed the primeval forest, a space that looks like a set for Jurassic Park. Indeed, the location featured in the 2021 filming of the Netflix series, Life on Our Planet, which brought extinct creatures back to virtual life in video footage. The clip shows a giant millipede, Arthropleura, which measured over 2.5 metres long – the size of a small car.
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The tree fern is a plant with which Alexander has had an affinity since his early 20s when his aunt Cora, a family friend of his mother’s, bought him his first Dicksonia antarctica.
It prompted him to start a hobby business selling plants, while not yet ready to give up his then day job at AIB. It was this side hustle that first brought him to Kells Bay, delivering stock to its then owners.
The setting blew him away. He made his first offer on the house, of €2 million, around 2006. It was rejected. About a year later the agent came back saying the owners would accept it. At this point he didn’t have the €2 million, and offered a lower price, of €1.5 million, which was accepted.
The property needed serious upgrading.
“I started with the roof, taking it down and replacing it,” Alexander says. He thinks this cost about €150,000.
To eliminate damp, he dug down into the ground floor to insulate it and lay an underfloor heating system, geo-thermal-operated. Underfloor heating works really well in old houses, especially coastal ones.
The property was a building site for seven or eight years, with Alexander travelling down from Dublin on a Thursday, meeting with builders on the Friday morning, and then doing the long five-hour drive back to Dublin on a Sunday.
On the terrace outside the house, where day-tripper visitors to the 60 acres of gardens can enjoy coffee and tea with a view, there are potted palms four to five metres in height. These form part of the theatre of the place and are transported from the polytunnels by forklift for the season, to help fill out the backdrop.
“They give a more tropical feel,” he explains. Cordylines fill the middle distance, with fuchsia below, and you can see the sea beyond.
Thousands of people visit the gardens every year. Groups of children come on school tours before term time. And yet you cannot see any of this traffic from the house, because he had the location excavated to ensure it would be at a level below at a cost of about €40,000.
His happy place, though, is with his beloved Dicksonia antarctica in the nursery, where he estimates he has 600 or 700 specimens at varying levels of maturity.
He surveys the grounds daily, either in the early morning or early evening, when guests are still readying themselves for the day or having dinner or pre-dinner drinks. He likes to inspect the polytunnel and nursery and take the sky bridge, a rope bridge that crosses one of the moss-clad gorges. Throughout the property, timber sculptures of dinosaurs and lizards stand life-size, designed by Pieter Koning and Nathan Solomon.
Inside, he reconfigured the layout slightly, installing a commercial kitchen to the back and a large office – the control room of the operation, where he spends most of his days. The food and beverage and accommodation at the house accounts for 60 per cent of its revenue. The other 40 per cent comes from the garden cafe, the sale of plants and entrance fees to the gardens. Entrance is €9.50 per adult, while a family of five, two adults and three children, costs €30.
Residents are served Thai cuisine, featuring local fish cooked by his wife, head chef Penn Alexander. They met in Phuket, Thailand, where Billy was holidaying to escape the madness of Italia ’90. They kept in touch by old-fashioned letter, as Penn’s English was only rudimentary, and the following year he took a three-month leave of absence from his bank job, and they travelled around Thailand. They’ve been together 35 years and moved down to live at Kells Bay about 11 years ago.
Previously, Penn had been working in a restaurant in Dalkey but wanted to set up her own place. “The cost of leasing alone would have been €150,000 just to get going. Now we have a premises,” he explains. They opened their doors in 2014; it took a full year before they were operating seriously.
Actor Colin Farrell paid the spot a visit while filming The Lobster in nearby Sneem. “I didn’t know who he was. He requested, ‘Your best Thai green chicken curry, as spicy as you can make it!’ and gave his approval a short while later, saying this was ‘the best f***ing spicy Thai green curry’ he’d ever had.”
Domhnall Gleeson dined there while filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Taoiseach Micheál Martin is a repeat guest – making use of the direct access to the beach to take a morning dip when in residence.
Accommodation wise, the property has 11 bedrooms in nine different spaces. Four are upstairs in the main house. Three of these are ensuite. The fourth has exclusive use of the adjoining bathroom, a concept he says he has to explain to some visitors as they cannot get their heads around it.
In addition to the rooms in the house there are five own-door units in the annex. Two of these have two double bedrooms.
While children are welcome to visit the estate, overnight stays are adults-only.
The rooms are booked out through July and August. A weekend night in September costs €150 per room, with breakfast from €12.50-€16. Dinner at Sala Thai restaurant is a la carte, and almost all the main courses are less than €25.
