Over the years, piecemeal restorations have kept Fota House from ruin, now the Irish Heritage Trust is bringing full realisation to previous projects
THERE ARE MORE than 47 working fireplaces in Fota House, and conservation architect John O’Connell can decode every one of them. This is not just because it’s his business to understand period detail and function, but because he has been here before, has dressed and furnished and harmonised these rooms in a restoration project undertaken from 1978 to 1983.
The Fota estate was then owned by University College Cork, and Cork businessman Richard Wood had undertaken to bring Fota back to life as a living showcase of Irish furniture and decoration with fittings, from curtains to console tables, bought from sales at other Irish houses. He would also display within its rooms his own collection of 18th- and 19th-century Irish landscape paintings, second in importance only to that genre at the National Gallery in Dublin. Although this commitment was realised to the extent that Fota House won a European award for its excellence as a small museum (and O’Connell’s refurbishment won an RIAI silver medal) its fulfilment was aborted when the estate was sold in 1988.
“To return to a project is to be called to heaven,” says O’Connell now as he stands briefly motionless in Fota’s pillared hall, explaining the use of the €1.6 million supplied by the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. Although expressed in professionally precise diction, his attitude to the expenditure on chimney stacks, roofs, ceilings, flooring, central heating, wiring and repainting all the second-floor rooms of the house carries a heady sense of something like amendment. This time Fota is being re-made, and made good.
“We have worked out the coherence of the rooms as they were used by family, guests or staff,” says O’Connell. “All the way through the house you can see examples of the ultimate in joinery work, the way all the architraves and window-frames are moulded or enriched – all these had to be refreshed, repainted, the floors re-waxed and the double-branched Edwardian pendant lights taken down, cleaned and re-wired. And all the time we’re seeking inspiration from the ghosts, for while we have nothing new to say, we have to say it to a new audience.”
For such a serene composition, in which the house is the architectural focus of a completely integrated demesne of farmyard, railed pastures, orchards, kennels and gardens, Fota has produced an unusual degree of acrimony and, almost certainly, despair. It has also given extraordinary examples of fortitude, as in the long custody of the house by the Fota Trust in the persons of former MEP Prof Tom Raftery and Prof Bill Watts, who was succeeded as chairman by David Bird, and in the flourishing condition of the formal gardens and arboretum managed by the OPW. This body not only completed a second recovery programme for the house in 2003 (with another RIAI silver medal) but also restored the lovely orangery in the grounds.
Although piecemeal, these developments kept the core of Fota safe and relatively immune from the impact of such other developments as the adjacent golf course and hotel. Some areas suffered: the landscape vista was compromised by a car-park; the long gallery and the billiard room were used as shop and cafe; the orchard and kitchen gardens with their ranges of greenhouses and cold-frames grew only dereliction. All these had flourished in the care of the last of the Barrys of Fota, the devoted plantswoman Dorothy Bell. In a story which almost matches the impact on Vita Sackville West of the loss of Knole, Bell had sold a family property in England in order to purchase Fota from the male cousin who had inherited. She lived, hospitably and as a good neighbour, in the house with her husband Major William Bell and their three daughters until her death in 1975.
If Fota could most recently be seen as something of a sleeping beauty, with briars choking the kitchen gardens to death and the unlighted fireplaces hollow with cold from floor to floor, Prince Charming was saddling his horse in the shape of the newly formed Irish Heritage Trust. It might be something of an imaginative leap to identify John O’Connell as the steed but certainly the prince was doubly personified by Sir David Davies as chairman of the IHT and Kevin Baird as its chief executive. With Fota (instead of Annesgrove as initially proposed) as the first property in its portfolio, the trust had to show not just what it intended to do but what it could do.
“There’s a whole raft of reasons why we asked John to come back to Fota,” says Kevin Baird. “He’s on our tendering list, for one thing, but essentially it’s the fact that he knows the house intimately and also that he’s an expert on the Morrison designs and decor and understands their vocabulary so well. He’s very happy with the results but the truth is that all this is Fota’s gain.”
To O’Connell this latest in the series of restorations is a matter of closing up the seams between one programme and the next. This is almost physically obvious, as he fingers a dado’s pattern and matches it to the gilded panelling of a door, or smoothes the lustre on a fireplace canopy to indicate its date and its fuel. This is part of the narrative of the house: this, with the finger-plates and escutcheons, the pelmet boxes and folding shutters, the stucco garlands of the boudoir or the stunning Sibthorpe stencils enhancing the plaster intricacies of the drawing-room ceiling, the ante-rooms, the nurseries, the presses in housekeeper’s room, the game larder with its carousel – all these elements are brought together in one enchanting text.
WORKING WITH HIS associates Colin McCabe and Audrey Farrell and with Cornerstone as the main contractors the 16-week programme was completed on time and on budget. There is more to come. Art historian William Laffan has already re-hung the paintings purchased from Richard Wood and given under the cultural tax relief scheme to the IHT by Tom McCarthy and his family in Cork.
Within this interlocking process the master plan devised by O’Connell will include, courtesy of a €1.75 million grant from Fáilte Ireland which must be matched by the IHT, the rehabilitation of the orchard, kitchen gardens, bothies and Head Gardener’s house.
John O’Connell could never be said to wander through a property; his motion is always decisive, and under his hard builder’s hat his excitement is obvious as he takes time to admit that “This is the absolute realisation of all that we had envisaged in 1978”. Identifying the provenance of tie-backs at a window, or the copied wall-paper in an upper room, he goes into rapid technical detail about stresses and cantilevers and the qualities of different paints before reflecting on the advantages of his long absence from Fota.
“When I left this house 30 years ago I was absolutely convinced I would never be coming back; usually in the passage of one’s career it’s rare to get back to the same railway station, let alone the same train. Despite all that’s happened in the interval it’s been a huge advantage that I’ve walked up and down so many more avenues, more staircases and through so many more doors.” Reminded that Fota has its own train-station, he goes on his way, rejoicing.
Fota House opens with an Easter Egg Hunt on April 11 and to the general public on April 14
About the house
* Philip de Barri arrived in Ireland from Wales sometime in 1183. As Earls of Barrymore his successors settled near Cobh on Cork harbour at the now restored Barryscourt Castle.
* The fourth son of the 4th Earl of Barrymore married a Dorothy Smith in 1746 and in the 1820s his grandson John Smith Barry engaged Sir Richard Morrison (a native of the area) and his son William Vitruvius to enlarge his hunting lodge at Foaty Island near Cobh.
* After the death in 1975 of Dorothy Bell, younger daughter of Cork’s unionist MP Arthur Hugh Smith Barry, UCC bought the estate for off-campus studies in agriculture, botany, zoology and horticulture. The Royal Zoological Society of Ireland inaugurated the wildlife park and businessman Richard Wood restored, furnished and opened the mansion as a small museum.
* After UCC’s controversial sale of the property in 1988 the Wood paintings and furniture were removed and the house was managed by the Fota Trust Company. The OPW eventually took over the gardens and arboretum and in 2003 completed another restoration programme concentrating on the principal ground-floor rooms and installing a modern kitchen. In 2008 Fota House was taken over as the first property of the new Irish Heritage Trust.
* The Irish Heritage Trust commissioned a survey of works as the first phase in a comprehensive plan to include upper stories and neglected areas of the grounds. The Wood Collection was bought by the McCarthy family of Cork and donated to Fota House, along with paintings the McCarthys had bought from the Smith Barry collection in London.
* The gardens and arboretum at Fota are free and open to the public; the refurbished house is to re-open in April.