Marlay House regains its stature

By now, the story is all-too familiar: after years of shameful neglect, an historic Irish property has been rescued and restored. In the case of Marlay House, in Rathfarnham, Dublin, however, the owner responsible for the building's decline and refurbishment is the same.

Once home to the La Touche family of Huguenot bankers, Marlay was bought by Dublin County Council in 1972 and its demesne developed as a park and opened to the public three years later. The house was left to suffer from lack of attention and maintenance, even while its adjacent stable courtyard (where artist Evie Hone once lived) was transformed into a series of craftshops. At one point in the 1970s, demolition of Marlay House was even considered and although some essential repairs were carried out before the end of that decade - when the house might have become offices for the Eastern Health Board - it now seems these caused considerable damage to the fabric.

Finally, in the early 1990s, a decision was taken by the local authority - now Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council - to restore the house and, less than a fortnight ago, the preliminary results of this work were finally shown. The refurbishment is by no means finished, but already it is clear that Marlay House deserved to be saved, and that this task should have been undertaken much sooner. Part of the charm of the place is precisely that, while splendid, Marlay is by no means one of Ireland's grandest houses. Its 17th century origins, while thoroughly concealed by later additions, suggest the original building, called The Grange, was a relatively modest farmhouse. The greater part of the property now seen dates from after 1764 when the Marlay estate was purchased by David La Touche from Thomas Taylor, a former Lord Mayor of Dublin.

Later an MP and the first Governor of the Bank of Ireland, La Touche renamed the estate after his wife, Elizabeth Marlay, daughter of the Bishop of Dromore. He was also responsible for the redevelopment of the main house, a seven-bay structure of two storeys over basement, with a bow at either end and a handsome Doric-columned central door executed in Portland stone and granite. Having been owned by the La Touches for a century, in 1864 Marlay was sold to Dublin coal merchant Robert Tedcastle, whose descendants sold the estate in 1925 to a market gardener and horse breeder, Philip Love. It was from his family that Dublin County Council acquired Marlay in the early 1970s for just under £1 million.

Externally, Marlay is starkly handsome, the facade relieved only by an urn on the parapet bearing the La Touche arms; according to Maurice Craig, this piece of ornamentation "is obviously derived from those on the Custom House," a contemporaneous building.

When work started on refurbishment, almost every glazing bar in the windows had to be replaced, explains Richard Shakespeare from Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, so rotten had their wood become. Working with architect John O'Connell, Mr Shakespeare has been responsible for supervising the work on Marlay House during the past three years, work carried out by staff from the local authority and FAS trainees, with more than 350 of the latter participating in the project.

The neo-classical interior of Marlay House is just as restrained as the exterior, but less severe. The hallway has a screen of Corinthian columns and pilasters to one side, and a delicate frieze of tripods and sphinxes running around the walls below the cornice. The sphinxes reappear on the substantial stone fireplace, as does the La Touche arms. In this room, a new Portland stone floor has been laid; the old one had to be taken up during restoration work because of the need to attend to materials beneath. Elsewhere on the ground floor, old wooden floors have been reinstated, with missing sections replaced by timber taken from nearby Rathfarnham Castle.

The most dramatic rooms in the house are the bow-ended ballroom and the adjacent oval music room. The former contains elaborate Adamesque plasterwork, which may have been executed by Michael Stapleton, on both the ceiling and walls. Among the room's more curious features are two oval stucco frames containing canvases executed in the late 19th/early 20th centuries painted with figures in a Grecian style. Beautiful as this space is, it cannot compare with the oval room, its plasterwork containing musical motifs attributed to James Wyatt and its floor covered by a carpet woven for this space in the late 19th century.

Once again, a later and delightful addition is that the corridor linking the oval room and ballrooms is decorated with a series of 19th century decoupage panels. There is more ceiling plasterwork at the other side of the house, where another bow-ended room, formerly the library, has been completely recreated with help from one of a series of drawings made by a member of the La Touche family in the early 1840s.

An adjoining passageway indicates how the house was constantly being redesigned as new sections were added over many years; the ceiling here is of two different heights and the decoration is an unusual amalgamation of the gothic and the neo-classical as might perhaps have been interpreted by Soane.

The first floor rooms give an even clearer sense of Marlay's gradual development. One very substantial bedroom with coved ceiling suggests, through its Palladian decoration, a date as early as the 1740s while other rooms are quite clearly almost half a century later.

Some of the internal divisions are so thick that they must, at some time, have been external walls. The layout of rooms means that a number of the windows are actually hidden behind screens, while cupboards and storage areas in certain instances have no access to external light, again indicating additions to an original - and smaller - house.

It will probably be impossible ever to discover for certain exactly how Marlay House was developed over successive decades; part of the place's charm lies precisely in the quirkiness of its layout and the oddity of individual rooms' design.

While the staircase and back hall have been painted to imitate stone blocking, all the first floor rooms have been papered in designs created by Celbridge-based specialist David Skinner who based his work on surviving fragments taken from the walls. Although Marlay House was officially "opened" earlier this month, restoration on the site will not be completed for at least another six months; at the moment, the 17th century structure next to the main property is still a building site. This part of the house is to contain a shop and restaurant which will be run by the Irish Table Top Group, the company which will be responsible for Marlay House's maintenance once the local authority has finished restoration.

The ground floor rooms will be furnished from a variety of sources as material - and funds - become available and are to be open to the public for visits. The first floor rooms and much of the rest of the house will be made available for corporate conferences and banqueting.

Also due to be opened to the public on a regular basis are the house's old walled gardens, which have been recreated in the style of the Regency period. One section now contains a fully-operational kitchen garden containing a wide range of fruit, vegetables and herbs.

Next to this is an ornamental garden in which an orangery, thatched-roof arbour, ornamental fountain and a "wet wall" have been constructed. Here, the head gardener's house, fallen into total ruin, has also been rebuilt to act as a reception centre for visitors to the formal gardens.

While Marlay House has been - and still is - the subject of a major restoration, once work is complete, the property will be expected to pay its own way; hence all the activities in which the Irish Table Top Group is engaged. As Richard Shakespeare explains: "This isn't viable as a stand-alone historic house; we just wouldn't get enough visitors to cover costs. If we want to have it occupied and used, then we must find other ways of making money from the house."