Emo Court is one of the most exquisite architectural jewels in Ireland: it is Gandon at his most perfect, though also his most deferred. The building was commissioned in 1790 but only completed 80 years later, which even by the leisurely standards of Irish builders cannot be called impetuous.
The finest part of the house, the rotunda, erected long after Gandon had departed for the great Custom House in the sky, was completed under the supervision of Thomas Caldbeck.
It is the rotunda which makes Emo so wonderful, for it is, quite simply, architectural perfection, which was both vandalised and preserved by the Jesuits. Indeed, there are few examples of the Jesuits' extraordinary sense of history to compare with their conduct towards Emo Court.
Gandon had designed the house for John Dawson, later the Earl of Portarlington, a scion of a banking family of Dublin, whose name lives on in Dawson Street. Emo Court is not large - not nearly as big as Castletown - and it was set in spectacular parkland. The driveway was one-and-a-half miles long, which the postman and the milkman must have just loved, and was planted during the 19th century with sequoia Wellingtonia. Most of the drive is gone now, but the lines of trees are protected, and they still stand like soldiers across the lovely Laois landscape.
Like so many landed families, the Dawsons grew exhausted with life in Ireland, and chose to leave 85 years ago. The Land Commission took over Emo, and in 1920 the family auctioned off the house's contents. That, now, is a sobering thought: for just who would turn up for an auction in that year? Half the gentry of Ireland were skulking in London, while the other half sat sleeping in the kitchen with a shotgun across their laps, as the night sky glowed with burning big houses.
Who was going to turn up for a sale of the contents of a Gandon house, when the fate of Gandon's other buildings across the island was being decided by Messrs Maguire, Patterson, and Par O'Finn? However, just about everything was sold, apart from a couple of lanterns - though God alone knows for what pitiful price - and the Dawsons left. Emo Court was then put in the hands of those gods of sloth, inertia and demolition, the Land Commission. Yet miraculously, the house remained intact for another 10 years, when the Jesuits bought it for a novitiate.
No space in the building suited as a chapel, so the Js demolished a wall between the magnificent rotunda and the dining-room next door. This was a perfectly shocking act, because the rotunda possessed an almost perfect geometric integrity. Moreover, the lower walls of the rotunda consisted of elaborate stone archways, and the cupola was "supported" by ornamental Siena marble columns. There was no way to unite the dining room with the rotunda without removing these columns and archways.
Yet the Jesuits clearly knew theirs was a temporary stewardship, for unlike almost anyone else at that time - and indeed for decades to come - they didn't smash the archways, but stored them in the cellars. And so Emo became the training ground for generations of young Jesuits. The great Father Browne, photographer and war hero, lived here, and no doubt recorded what the seminary was like: his pictures would make a fascinating contrast with the house today.
In 1969, once again with extraordinary foresight, the Jesuits realised that their days of large-scale recruitment were over. They put Emo on the market, so prompting the arrival of the true hero of Emo, the greatest in its history since Gandon: an Englishman, Major CD Cholmeley-Harrison.
Deirdre O'Brien, our splendid tour guide, told us of this gentleman, and not taking notes, I now have a lingering suspicion that Cholmeley occurs more than once in his name; that like Featherstonehaugh or ffoliot, Cholmely always occurs in pairs. For all I know, today he goes by the abbreviated version of his name, and his baptismal certificate consists of rolling foothills of hyphenated Cholmeleys, clustering around one another like Chilterns.
No matter. This splendid man found Emo, and in Chum, Emo found its rescuer; and unlike any other great Georgian house in Ireland, it found true glory only in modern times. For our Chum has a truly magnificent eye both for furniture and a bargain, and he has made it his life's business to bring life and style to Emo. He has succeeded triumphantly.
He restored the stone archways to the rotunda. Two Siena marble columns had vanished completely so he went to Italy and found samples which matched the marble used in Emo. He reconstructed the rotunda with a matchless aesthetic: it emanates an extraordinary sense of artistic achievement, as if pure intent had been matched by perfect outcome, conveying a sensation which I once received in the Taj Mahal, but in few other places. It is a deeply, deeply satisfying room.
Moreover, there is something almost Wodehousian about Chum's simple enthusiasms: one photograph which has pride of place in Emo is of his headmaster at Stowe public school 80 years ago. Such a culture of lifelong, unwavering respect was born of the empire, and perished with it also.
Chum made Emo over to the State 10 years ago, on condition that he be allowed end his days there. He still lives there, a truly great and noble Englishman in poor health, and if anyone deserves to be an honorary citizen of Ireland, he most assuredly does. As Cicero once said: Emo amo.