Selling up: the Gettys of Gurthalougha House

Billionaire John Paul Getty III is selling his Irish hideaway, a 100-acre estate on the shores of Lough Derg in Co Tipperary, which he bought in 1998

THE AMERICAN billionaire, John Paul Getty III is selling his Co Tipperary home, a Victorian lodge on 100 acres on the shores of Lough Derg, a short boat ride away from Terryglass. Mr Getty and his mother Gail Harris Getty have lived on and off at Gurthalougha House over the last 12 years. However, they have now put the property on the market at €5.2 million. The agent is Knight Frank.

Mr Getty, 53 and wheelchair bound, now divides his time between the UK and Italy. Mrs Harris Getty, who was responsible for renovating Gurthalougha and its grounds, still visits the property but has now begun to move the bulk of the furniture and paintings to the family’s other homes in the US and Europe.

Mr Getty bought Gurthalougha, a former Hidden Ireland guest-house just outside the village of Ballinderry, in 1998, around the time several members of the Getty family acquired Irish passports under the “passports for investment” scheme just before it was abolished.

He paid around £1 million (€1.27 million) for the house, where he has led a reclusive life under medical supervision. Getty is the grandson of John Paul Getty, the American industrialist who founded Getty Oil and was once declared America’s richest man – the man who at one time famously installed a coin-operated telephone in his New York mansion.

The teenage John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by Sicilian bandits in the 1970s. When his grandfather refused to pay the $17 million ransom, a further demand arrived with an envelope containing the 16-year-old’s ear. A ransom was paid and John Paul was restored to his family, but he later became a drug addict and was paralysed by an overdose in 1981.

A spokesperson for Mr Getty confirmed that he was putting the property on the market reluctantly.

Gurthalougha has been thoroughly refurbished over the last decade, according to Robert Ganly of Knight Frank and is now undergoing full redecoration in anticipation of viewings.

Used as a year-round retreat for family and friends, the house has 12 bedrooms with extra space in a quaint two-bedroom cottage that overlooks a fully-stocked walled garden. Here, at some distance from the house, the vegetable and fruit beds have a dedicated gardener who also tends the contents of a Victorian style, centrally heated greenhouse.

A total of four indoor and four outdoor staff are employed to keep the house while guests are in residence. It’s an extremely stylish building, decorated in a bohemian style with a mix of antiques and junk shop finds. Doors and shutters have been stripped back and polished, floorboards have been painted in pale colours from Farrow Ball, and the stairs and landings are carpeted in fashionable sisal.

The influences are French and American rather than Irish, though the room-sized entrance with its magical views of the lake is decorated with a striking pale green shamrock wallpaper.

To one side of the hall is a formal diningroom; on the other is a double drawingroom with four tall sash windows looking out over lawns and lake. Leading off the drawingroom is yet another reception room, a large and atmospheric library that give access to Mr Getty’s bedroom and bathroom.

All these rooms occupy the main section of the house but there are many more in the courtyard section to the rear. There’s a main kitchen, breakfastroom and sittingroom – for staff perhaps rather than family – and then a second kitchen, as well as sculleries, store rooms and a room just for logs.

Upstairs the pattern is repeated with a number of splendid bedrooms facing the lake, and two corridors. One leads towards the main en suite bedroom, with its opulent cream-carpeted bedroom and next-door bathroom which is almost as large. On the other side of the house is a corridor of attic style bedrooms with sloping ceilings and pretty furnishings.

All of these rooms have en suite bathrooms, though some of the larger rooms don’t, the Gettys having taken out previous en suites from the guest-house days to restore the original proportions of the rooms. An immaculate stretch of lawn in front of the house descends to the lake where there is a jetty and landing stage as well as a swimming platform.

The grounds are a mix of woodland and farmland. It’s a nice stroll from the house to Ballinderry with its two pubs, 1.5kms from the gate. The house is set well back from the road, and invisible except from the lake.