History housed in your home

Does your house have a past? Many people and companies are now commissioning house histories to find out. Edel Morgan reports

If you own an old house - or are about to buy one - you may be curious about its past. While you're up to your elbows in dirty washing, have you ever wondered if its 18th or 19th century owners had maids to do it for them in the scullery. Or if refined ladies sat in crinolines in your front parlour? Could your home have been the backdrop to a society scandal or a meeting place for poets and scholars?

One way to satisfy your curiosity is to commission a detailed house history. Research consultancy Eneclánn will uncover its past at a cost of €450 to over €1,000, depending on how steeped in history it turns out to be. One of Eneclánn's more salacious recent discoveries when investigating a 19th century house in Killiney was that its first owner, a financier, scandalised society when he absconded to South Africa after squandering £117,000 of his clients' money - about €20 million today. He was subsequently arrested and deported back to Ireland. It later emerged that he had spent most of the money doing up his house.

To get to the bottom of a property's past, Eneclánn consults street directories, census returns, legal documents and architectural records.

The service is used by a variety of people, including architects, estate agents, developers and families wanting to find out more about the origins of their house. It is also becoming popular as a quirky wedding or anniversary gift.

Because the histories take around eight-10 weeks to compile, Cathy McCartney, Eneclánn's marketing manager, says a more suitable gift for Christmas would probably be a framed 19th century ordinance survey map showing the recipient's house, priced from €130.

Estate agents like Sherry FitzGerald and Douglas Newman Good use the service in the hope it will throw up juicy facts that they can use in the marketing of large period houses. People also do it to probe into a "belief about a house", says McCartney. "It could be that that someone famous is thought to have lived there. We did a house which the owner, a charity, wanted to redevelop, but it was thought to have been the birthplace of an 18th century playwright and MP. It turned out that the real birthplace was a few doors away and the street had been renumbered. The development was allowed."

The houses Eneclánn take on tend to be pre-1900, "the bigger and older the more likely there are to be interesting stories attached". They also tend to be over 186sq m (2,000sq ft).

Smaller period or artisan homes can be less successful. "Some of them were built for the working classes and poorer people left less of a paper trail, like wills and deeds. In those cases, you may be able to discover who lived there but not much more."

A house history can give a fascinating insight into social change, says McCartney. Henrietta Street in Dublin 1, for example, was one of the grandest in Dublin but the demise of the Irish Parliament through the Act of Union in 1800 saw them turn into tenements by the late 19th century.

The 19th century property market had its bubbles and slumps, just as subsequent centuries. The thriving rental market of the 19th century meant that homes changed hands often. As now, people built houses on spare land and rented them to supplement a pension.

While nowadays people put their children through college on the proceeds, then it could have been to fund a dowry or support a spinster daughter. Period houses can also be living museums. "Some of the larger country mansions in particular feature rare surviving work by local craftsmen ."

[ www.eneclann.ie ]