FOTA HOUSE, the only historic property saved so far by the Irish Heritage Trust, has had a lot of good work done on its fabric in recent years. But like the mad aunt in the attic, nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room or, rather, in the setting of the Smith-Barry’s one-time home.
On rising ground to the south, some 200 cars are casually parked all over the grass, in full frontal view of the house. It transpires that these have been strewn around the place by visitors to the Fota Wildlife Park, even though it has its own less intrusive official car park. So why then is the unofficial carparking tolerated?
People had “got into the habit” of parking on the grass, we were informed. But couldn’t they just be told that they simply can’t park there anymore, I asked. It’s not so simple, however, because there are three or four different bodies that own the bits and pieces of Fota, and they would all have to agree, etc.
In the meantime, something that wouldn’t be tolerated in similar settings elsewhere in Europe has been permitted here, even regarded as “normal” in our car culture. And while Fota is no Blenheim or Versailles, the setting of this rather severe neo-classical mansion near Cork is arguably as important as the building.
I was there with other members of the Irish Georgian Society’s conservation awards jury, and it was the recent work carried out on the house itself that we were looking at. However, we were told that the grounds are “much more popular” than the house, where the main draw is a café on the ground floor.
Architect John O’Connell had worked on it in the 1980s for Richard Wood, who was inspired to restore Fota as a suitable place to hang his important collection of Irish landscapes. But wanton neglect by UCC – which owned Fota at the time – led to the house falling into decay, and Wood had to take out his pictures.
O’Connell knows Fota well. The 1820s house was designed by Richard Morrison and redesigned by his son William. It is not particularly attractive, perhaps due to the replacement of multi-paned late-Georgian windows with Victorian plate glass. Ancient cordylines in the grounds also took a battering last winter.
As fellow juror Dr Edward McParland noted, “some careful redecoration has been carried out, involving the scientific retrieval of original colour and gilding schemes, but more general decorative and furnishing work has not yet reached a point where all of the rooms are in a final form for public access” – to show how the Smith-Barrys lived.
More impressive is Russborough House, in Co Wicklow. Not only is it one of the finest Palladian houses in Ireland, but the recent work carried out by Howley Hayes Architects has secured its future by reinforcing the roof, restoring the windows and fire-damaged west wing and upgrading fire safety and security systems.
Forensic paint consultant Richard Ireland was engaged to research the original colour schemes and concluded that the interiors had been painted to look like stone. So, gone are the canary yellow alcoves in the entrance hall and (hopefully) soon to go are the mustard colour sittingroom and the “Germolene pink” diningroom.
There was surprisingly strong opposition to the plan to reinstate the original stone-coloured plaster, rather than retaining the colour scheme from the period when the house was occupied by Sir Alfred and Lady Beit. But James Howley insisted that his approach was the correct one, and he has been proved gloriously right.
The works at Russborough were so complex that they involved no less than 50 sub-contractors, supervised by the architects. Yet, as Dr McParland observed, it was all done so discreetly that “the house looked wonderfully ‘settled’, with no unwelcome traces of so much recent work”. New walking routes add to its attractions.
Up in Co Antrim, we found it hard to credit that the Camellia House at Shane’s Castle (designed by John Nash and built by 1816) had been dismantled and rebuilt, after storms had ripped out more than half of its glass and left it in a ruinous state – a suitable companion for the gaunt ruin of the castle itself, looking out over Lough Neagh.
Located on a terrace that bristles with cannon, the Camellia House was restored for Lord O’Neill by Alistair Coey Architects. Most of the original cast iron roof trusses were conserved, as was the scalloped glass and the pivoted doors that open up to ventilate the camellias; these ancient plants would have died but for the restoration.
The former railway station in Dundrum, Co Tipperary, might also have been lost. One of the most extravagant stations on the Great Southern Western Railway, with turrets, gables and tall chimney stacks, it was built at the behest of Cornelius Maude, Viscount Hawarden, who had given the railway a free ride through his Dundrum Castle estate.
Rescued by architect Kyran Colgan, it now provides him with a stylish, comfortable home and studio. With all of its architectural features intact externally, perhaps too much plaster has been stripped off inside to reveal rubble stone and Dolphin’s Barn brick. There is a view from the shower of the adjoning Dublin-Cork mainline – and vice versa.
Carroll’s, the chain of tourist shops, was behind the final project shortlisted for this year’s awards. Called “A Wall for the Queen”, by architect Denis Byrne, it involved two Georgian houses on Gardiner Street with perfectly matching returns, the addition of a new building to the rear and the restoration of a garden wall on Deverell Place.
It’s a mix of bed-and-breakfast accommodation and offices for Carroll’s, with a linking corridor indicated by a glazed clerestory above the terracotta-coloured wall – originally built to coincide with a visit by Queen Victoria in 1900.
“A lot of fluffy lepreachauns went into this,” joked Lorcan O’Connor, who oversaw the whole project. We were dubious about tuck-pointing the façades of the two Georgian houses, “wigging and tucking”, as it’s known in the trade, is too grand for Gardiner Street. But nobody could deny the marvellous improvement to Deverell Place, right in front of the Central Model School.
“As we sped along the motorways between visits, we had spirited arguments about conservation criteria, about the change of use in a conserved building, about the role of contemporary design, about the relative complexity of the different projects,” Dr McParland recalled. “It did us all good to see so much excellent work . . . in these gloomy days.”
Sadly, Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin and president of the Irish Georgian Society, was too ill to accompany us; he died on September 15th.
GEORGIAN SOCIETY CONSERVATION AWARDS 2011
WINNER: Russborough House, Co Wicklow (Howley Hayes Architects)
HIGHLY COMMENDED: Camellia House, Shane's Castle, Co Antrim (Alistair Coey Architects)
ORIGINAL DRAWINGS: Mark Costello (for "Dublin's Parlour) and Liam Mulligan (for the Red House, Youghal, Co Cork)
JUDGES
Marion Cashman, architectural adviser for the awards
David Griffin, director of the Irish Architectural Archive
Frank McCloskey, director of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects;
Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, The Irish Times
