Ballyfin Review: The House That Waited

Ballyfin stood empty for fifty years. The Regency mansion that Richard Morrison built for the Coote family between 1820 and 1826 — the finest Regency house in Ireland, in the considered assessment of the architectural historians who have been making this assessment since the Irish Georgian Society identified the building in the 1980s as one of the most important country houses in the country — passed through the hands of the Patrician Brothers, who used it as a school, and stood derelict through the 1990s while the cost of restoration defeated successive owners. Fred and Kay Krehbiel bought it in 2002 and spent a decade and approximately €30 million restoring it to a condition of such completeness that the Irish Architectural Archive’s photographs of the finished restoration look like the building in its original decade rather than the building after two centuries of institutional use and fifty years of partial vacancy.

The restoration’s achievement — and it is the finest country house restoration in Ireland and one of the finest in Europe — is the preservation of the State Rooms’ original decorative programme: the gilded plasterwork ceilings, the Siena marble chimneypieces, the hand-blocked wallpapers whose reproduction from the original samples the Krehbiels commissioned from the specialist craftspeople who work in this tradition in England, Ireland, and France. The Blue Room, the Gold Room, the Map Room where the original Morrison estate maps still hang in the original frames — these are not recreations of what the rooms once were. They are the rooms themselves, restored to the condition that the building’s quality and the Krehbiels’ investment warrants.

The Fifteen Rooms

Fifteen rooms in a house of this size is the decision that makes Ballyfin what it is rather than what it could have been. The economics of a fifteen-room hotel in a building that requires this level of maintenance are not the economics of a fifteen-room hotel in a converted farmhouse — the running costs, the staff-to-guest ratio that fifteen rooms in a three-thousand-acre demesne requires, and the specific investment in the horticultural programme that the walled garden’s restoration demands produce a nightly rate of approximately €1,500-€2,500 that the hotel’s occupancy and its commercial logic require and that the guest who arrives having understood the context accepts as the cost of inhabiting Ireland’s finest country house for a night or three.

The rooms are the State Rooms and the Bedroom Rooms of the original house — each with the plasterwork ceiling of its period, the four-poster bed appropriate to the room’s proportions, and the specific quality of a room that was designed for the life of a great house rather than for the turnover of a hotel occupancy. The breakfast is served in the State Dining Room at the communal table whose twenty-seat length accommodates the house’s full guest complement without the restaurant-table anonymity that the individual table format produces in a house that was built for the specific social experience of a household dining together.

The Demesne

Three thousand acres of County Laois — the parkland, the pleasure grounds, the walled garden whose restoration programme has been working since 2007, and the lake that the ha-ha below the house’s south front separates from the formal garden in the traditional eighteenth-century landscape design’s specific manner of borrowing the natural view while excluding the deer. The parkland walk — two hours through the demesne’s mature planting, the lake visible from the elevated sections, the ruins of the earlier house structure in the lower grounds — is the activity that most guests conduct on the first full morning before the house’s own programme of activities has been organised. The lake’s rowing boats in the afternoon and the evening fishing for the brown trout that the lake supports are included in the stay without the additional booking that a commercial operation would deploy for the same amenity.

The Food

The dinner at Ballyfin — five courses in the State Dining Room, the menu built from the walled garden’s produce and the Irish suppliers whose relationships the kitchen has been developing since the house opened — is the finest country house dinner in Ireland and the meal that most guests cite as the defining experience of the stay. The walled garden’s kitchen garden produces the vegetables and herbs at the specific stage of growth that the kitchen needs rather than the stage of growth that the commercial supply chain delivers; the County Laois farms supply the lamb and the beef whose provenance the kitchen knows specifically rather than generically; and the Irish dairy whose butter and cream the kitchen uses is from the creamery thirty kilometres east whose specific product the chef chose over the alternatives because the product is better. These are the decisions that a house of this size and this ownership structure can make and that the volume hotel cannot.

Ballyfin vs Adare Manor: The Comparison

Both are Ireland’s finest hotels depending on what is being measured. Adare has the Ryder Cup golf course, the village, the greater range of activities, and one hundred and four rooms against Ballyfin’s fifteen. Ballyfin has the privacy, the State Rooms, the restoration’s architectural completeness, and the specific quality of being in a house rather than in a hotel. Adare is the finest hotel in Ireland. Ballyfin is the finest country house in Ireland. The distinction is real and the choice between them is the choice between different things rather than between better and worse versions of the same thing.

Practical Details

15 rooms and suites. Full-board covering all meals and most activities. Adults-focused though not strictly adults-only. Rates from approximately €1,500-€2,500 per room per night. Dublin Airport approximately 90 minutes by road. The house closes for January and February — confirm the seasonal schedule at booking.

Book Ballyfin direct — Ireland’s most private country house, fifteen rooms in the finest Regency mansion in the country.