The hotel boom has peaked and the competition is mighty. Can the Shelbourne win back its exalted place among Dublin's five-star establishments? Orna Mulcahy, Property Editor, takes a tour of the renovated landmark.
Getting a sneak preview of the new Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen's Green in Dublin, wasn't easy. There were phone calls to the Marriott people who will run it, phone calls to the developer who built it, phone calls to the PR firm that will promote it and phone calls to the hotel's historian, who has been monitoring the changes to the grand old lady of the green. Hang on a minute. The hotel's historian? Is that a full-time job? Yes, it is, but then this is the most extravagant refurbishment in town. There has been nothing like it since Charlie Haughey renovated Government Buildings, in 1991. It has taken two years and a reported €83 million, and it's still not quite ready.
The Shelbourne was meant to open in time for the Ryder Cup, last September, then it was to open for Christmas and now the opening has been put off until "later this month", missing today's rugby international and St Valentine's Day, a lucrative night for restaurants. Inside, armies are at work. The restaurant is not quite finished, light fittings need replacing, hundreds of paintings and prints are stacked in hallways and teams of people are polishing the mahogany doors, laying carpets and testing the technology in the white-and-gold ballroom, which can accommodate 350 people. There will be a few all-nighters before the white blinds are raised and the doors are swept open by young men in grey livery and traditional pillbox hats.
The question is, will people like it? After all, it's our hotel. When it was sold first to a bank and then to a consortium of property developers and hoteliers a few years ago, many of us felt just like the author Terence de Vere White, who wrote: "I would be very angry if anyone laid hands on the Shelbourne Hotel. It was and will always remain the archetypal hotel, built at a time when people understood the souls of hotels and theatres and public houses." Quite right. For more than 175 years it had hosted Dublin's high and low society, any celebrity who came to town and all the hangers-on you might chance to meet in a long night at the Horseshoe Bar, where, as one Dublin wit put it, "women with a past met men with no future".
In 1922 the hotel provided the setting for one of the defining episodes in Irish history: the drafting of the Constitution under the chairmanship of Michael Collins. When the social season mattered, the big events happened at the Shelbourne: riotous hunt balls, for example, and, on one occasion, a party hosted by the owners, the Jury family, for 200 of their closest friends - in the kitchen.
A favourite haunt of Princess Grace of Monaco, it heaved with actors and writers in the 1950s. Later on it became the favourite meeting place for spin doctors and PR handlers, the corners of the Lord Mayor's Lounge bristling with worthies being interviewed by journalists. Retiring captains of industry were given their golden handshakes in the Constitution Room, on the days when it wasn't being used for government press conferences and legal dinners. The mezzanine floor, behind the lift, was the legendary setting for hole-in-the-corner business deals and illicit gropings.
Even so, it was all a bit tired and in need of an overhaul, much as it had been in Thackeray's day, when the author noticed that the window of his room was propped open by a sweeping brush. That was in 1842. By 2004 the corridors were so uneven that the room-service trolleys had developed minds of their own. Few people except elderly solicitors taking their families out for lunch at Christmas ventured into the fusty diningroom, and you had to wait a lifetime for stewed coffee and a sandwich in the Lord Mayor's Lounge. And although a hard core of legal and political types were fiercely loyal to the Horseshoe Bar, Dublin's new millionaires had drifted off to the Ice Bar at the Four Seasons, in Ballsbridge, to swill champagne and smoke Cohibas. Sure, it was alien and out of town, but the bar was fun and the service impeccable.
They'll all come back to the new Shelbourne. It's spectacular. "Budget? Everyone keeps talking about the budget. There was no budget," says historian Michael O'Sullivan, the hotel's historian, who is guiding us through the hotel with Liam Doyle, the Kildare man who returned from the US 18 months ago to manage the hotel.
"This is all bespoke," says O'Sullivan, waving a hand towards gilded plasterwork, intricate radiator covers and glistening chandeliers. "When you are restoring an old girl and giving her a new wardrobe there can be no budget." The dapper O'Sullivan, who has written a book on the hotel, as well as biographies of Mary Robinson and Seán Lemass, was given a blank cheque to buy art and artefacts for the hotel. He's very keen on the grand-old-lady-of-the-green concept. "Not just new clothes," he says, "but a new steel corset, too." The hotel has been rebuilt from the inside out, so that the corridors no longer creak. It's good for the next 200 years.
There are some major changes. First of all, take a look up the staircase. You can see all the way up to the sixth floor, a view that was intended by the Victorian architect John McCurdy, who was responsible for the last Shelbourne revamp, in the 1860s. It's a stunning sight that was blocked in 1906, when the hotel's famously temperamental hydraulic lift was installed. The lift is gone and the view is dazzling, past each landing decorated in ice-cream colours.
The Horseshoe Bar has been faithfully restored to Sam Stephenson's 1957 design, and it's sad he's not around to see it. It's all reassuringly familiar, but will it ever be the same again?
The fact is, there is a brand-new bar, and it is going to be packed from day one. Called Number 27, it's a vast L-shaped room with views onto the street, gorgeously ornate plasterwork, blazing chandeliers and a long bar where you can order more than 100 wines by the glass and nibble, if you will, on lobster lollipops. It's aimed at winning back drinkers from the Ice Bar, the Merrion's Cellar Bar and the new and trendy Dylan, in Ballsbridge, and you'd want to book a table right now: that one over in the corner with the view of the green, or the sofa just inside the door in front of the open fireplace - no puttering gas flames but real logs, one of three open fires that will warm the ground floor. Smokers will have a rooftop terrace that is still under construction on the mezzanine level.
Beside the lobby, the Lord Mayor's Lounge is all set to offer the "hushed, intimate luxury of deep cushioned lounges, low tables and discreet attentive service". In reality it's a disappointment, with dreary burgundy and green armchairs and suburban table lamps providing an inappropriate setting for abstract paintings by Barrie Cooke, Breon O'Casey and Hughie O'Donoghue. On the plus side, the coffee will be Illy, not the stewed brew of old served in pots that would burn the hand off you. Tea, in hand-sewn silk bags, will be flown in from San Francisco.
The tour continues through to the restaurant, which is now behind where the lift used to be. Called the Saddle Room, for old times' sake, and as a homage to the racing fraternity that has always gathered here (at one time the hotel porters were notorious tipsters), it will be a steak-and-seafood place where you can have, say, a dozen oysters at the marble-topped bar along with the house cocktail - a strawberry-and-rhubarb-flavoured-vodka concoction - before heading to the restaurant, an intriguing layout with numerous corners and cul-de-sacs with tables for two, four and six. It's all very tasteful until you get to two booths lined with studded gold leather, which look like the inside of a designer handbag.
The reception is at the back of the ground floor; here the marbled space is dominated by two brilliant life-size diptychs by Cian McLouglin of characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. These more than make up for the "hotel art" that dominates the bedroom corridors. We're also glad to report that political cartoons by Martyn Turner of The Irish Timeswill reappear in one of the private diningrooms.
The ballroom and its adjoining reception rooms, which are now accessible from inside the hotel, have been exquisitely decorated by Christina Fallah, a London-based designer. These salons and private diningrooms have to be the most beautiful the hotel has ever seen, with their elegant arrangements of Georgian Irish furniture, gilt-framed portraits and fabulously restrained white-on-white paint schemes and light fittings. And to think that one of them once housed the hotel gym.
On to the bedrooms, designed by Frank Nicholson, a veteran of the Ritz-Carlton division of Marriott International. The rooms so far completed are predictably luxurious, if a tad on the small side, and executives will be able to plug in any number of gizmos. Beds are high and piled with pillows. The feel is traditional, and those lucky enough to stay at the front of the hotel, in the "heritage rooms", will have marvellous views over St Stephen's Green. Room rates will start at €320, with "heritage" rates starting at about €410. Room only.
Finally, to the Constitution Room, with its deep-green silk-damask walls, billowing gold curtains and austere furnishings, including the table and chairs used for the drafting of Bunreacht na hÉireann, which O'Sullivan unearthed in a warehouse in England where many of the Shelbourne's furnishings had been stored after the hotel was sold to its current owners by Royal Bank of Scotland, in January 2005. It's a perfect room, full of gravitas.
The neighbouring meetingrooms have been converted into Georgian-style sittingrooms that one wants to move into immediately. A shame to think that they are going to be used for PowerPoint presentations and drug-company beanos, but then, after all, the Shelbourne is not just a glorious bit of social history; it's also a five-star hotel.