Ballyfin

Robert O'Byrne writing in The Irish Times 2002

In its present form, the main block was constructed between 1821 and 1826, but on the site of an earlier building and at the heart of an 18th- century demesne which remains largely as first planned. The estate had been owned by William Wellesley-Pole, a brother of the Duke of Wellington, and it was he and his forebears who laid out the estate, including the magnificent 36-acre man-made lake which lies in front of the house.

In 1812, Wellesley-Pole sold Ballyfin to Sir Charles Coote, premier baronet of Ireland, who soon decided to replace the late 18th- century building with something altogether more splendid. And the house into which he eventually moved really is extraordinarily grand, designed on a palatial scale such as has rarely been seen in this country, but is more commonly found among the princely residences of Italy or Russia.

Coote's original choice of architect was the relatively unknown Dominick Madden, who would later design the Roman Catholic cathedral in Tuam, Co Galway. His principal legacy at Ballyfin is the bow-fronted library that concludes the south-west wing of the house; but by 1822 Madden had been superseded by one of Ireland's most successful architects during the first half of the 19th century, Richard Morrison, who worked on the project with his son, William Vitrivius.

From the exterior, their work can seem somewhat austere, the long, 13-bay, two-storey grey facade relieved only by an enormous, if shallow, pedimented portico of four Ionic columns. However, it is the interior of Ballyfin which constitutes the house's glory, thanks to the extravagant scale of the main rooms and the lavish quantity of decoration applied to almost every available surface within them.

A relatively restrained entrance hall features a coffered ceiling and a floor inset with mosaic brought here from Rome. This leads into one of Ballyfin's finest spaces, the top-lit saloon with coved ceiling encrusted in grandiose plasterwork and an inlaid wooden floor of similar intricacy. At either end of the saloon are screens of columns and this feature proves to be one of the leitmotifs of Ballyfin.

Similar screens, in each case deploying a different-coloured marble, can also be found in the dining-room and the library, while a series of eight Siena columns run around the walls of the top-lit rotunda, another survival from Madden's original design. As in the saloon, the rotunda boasts 19th-century plasterwork of a complexity unsurpassed elsewhere in Ireland.

The white drawing-room, believed to date from the 1840s, is decorated in the Louis Quinze style with gilt ornamentation, including several full-length chinoiserie mirrors with their original glass, smothering the walls.

Every room in Ballyfin displays evidence that exceptional effort was taken over the house's design, whether the recessed mahogany bookcases in the library or the crisp plasterwork at each corner of the breakfast room's coved ceiling. The staircase hall, again top-lit, with cantilevered steps running up three sides of the space to a screened gallery, is another remarkable room which might have been transported from a Roman palazzo. On the first floor, two corridors lead to suites of bedrooms, because Ballyfin was a house built to hold large numbers of people.

But those numbers are no longer to be found, and most of the bedrooms have been either closed or now serve for storage. Some of them are barely habitable, because in recent years the house has suffered from water seeping through the roof and into the building. A corner of the ground-floor white drawing-room, for example, shows evidence of serious damage from this problem. Some years ago, the Patrician Brothers started to appeal for support in the maintenance of Ballyfin and, since January 2000, the State has provided €1.27 million towards restoring the roof.

That area is now stabilised, but according to conservation architect Paul Arnold, who has been supervising the project, more costly work is still required on the parapets and corbels. Then money will need to be spent elsewhere on the building, taking care of those sections which have been ruined by damp as well as rescuing such features as the saloon's marquetry floor, areas of which have become dislodged, and the unique glass and iron conservatory dating from around 1850 and believed to have been designed by Richard Turner.

Arnold estimates that a minimum of €5 million would be necessary to secure the house's future, although much more might be spent. And the grounds are also suffering from a shortage of funds for their upkeep: trees need to be thinned or felled, while other sections of the woodlands should be replanted; the grottoes and follies, including a 19th- century "medieval" observation tower, are suffering; and one of the neo-classical gate lodges is almost derelict.

Remarkable and deserving of support as Ballyfin may be, the question must be asked: who can or will come to its salvation? While the Patrician Brothers have to be commended for their preservation of the main house and park, the demands of running a large school meant that, over the past three-quarters of a century, they have added a considerable number of other buildings, none of which can be claimed to have any architectural merit. Indeed, the construction of a number of large blocks necessitated the destruction of Ballyfin's handsome stableyard.

Notable features include a man-made lake and and a sunken pathway to the 1830s tower with ornamental caves and arches in the romantic style.  The landscaping was probably by Sutherland