Covering 35,000 sq ft, with 24 bedrooms and a 70ft-long ballroom, the Guinness family’s former home is probably Ireland’s most opulent historic building.
During the Georgian and Victorian eras, a favourite sport among bluebloods was the countrywide game of “mine’s bigger than yours”, fought out in cut stone, marble, stucco and terrazzo. When Ireland gained its independence in the 1920s, hundreds of these mansions were burnt down by locals. It seemed certain that new homes on this scale would never be seen again.
But these days, standing at the Stalker Wallace GAA Club grounds in Limerick, crowds of locals are peering at a behemoth in bricks and mortar slowly coming together on the horizon. At 5,000 sq ft larger than Farmleigh, this is the 40,000-sq-ft new home of the financier and horse-racing magnate JP McManus.
Construction has entered its second year. Like the earls and lords of old, McManus does not like being overlooked and has offered to buy the GAA grounds at Martinstown to ensure his privacy. He has already hoovered up more than 600 acres of land locally.
The project has become something of a local tourist attraction in the past few months, with dozens of people making their way to Martinstown just to look at the scale of the thing.
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Built in a faux period style (Palladian), and designed by the Swiss architect Andre Durr, McManus’s new home will stand about 40 times the size of the average Irish family dwelling. McManus, a private man, has not revealed the total cost. Speculation has ranged from €20m to €100m, although €40m is more likely.
One estimate puts the bill for the interior marble and granite alone at €25m, with the sandstone cladding adding a further €10m. It has been claimed that the staircase is among the largest ever built in Europe.
The house includes nine full bedroom suites, a 200-seat cinema, a garage with car wash, the obligatory swimming-pool complex and, one source says, a 2,500-sq-ft room just for the dogs.
The sheer size of the building is inescapable. No country home on such a scale has been built in Ireland since the era of the Georgian aristocracy. Even before it is complete, Martinstown easily outstrips Earl Iveagh’s measly Farmleigh.
Martinstown is but the largest among a spate of huge modern mansions suddenly springing up all over Ireland, largely at the behest of local lads made good, returning home to demonstrate their wealth.
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McManus’s brother, Gerry, has clashed with An Taisce, the guardian of Ireland’s heritage, by adding a 20,000-sq-ft extension to his existing mansion, also in Limerick. The three wings amount to 20 times the average family home.
The McManus mansions are the tip of what some are now calling Ireland’s “McMansion” phenomenon — not after the McManuses, but from the term from America for the trend for constructing massive one-off “supersized” homes that often imitate the grandeur of period styles. Some properties take elements of recognisable historic styles and mix and match them.
Until the past five years, few homes over 5,000 sq ft had been built in Ireland, and the ultra-rich had always bought historic piles, but now there has been an explosion in nouveaux chateaux for the nouveaux riches. These people are eschewing traditional homes in favour of building their own personalised new palaces.
Westlife’s Shane Filan recently completed a neo-gothic odyssey with the building of a chateau in his native Sligo. The three-storey, sprawling, cut-stone extravaganza even comes with a turret tower against its entrance.
In the second-hand market, the McMansions are now beginning to show up for sale alongside traditional country piles.
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Dolores McNamara, Ireland’s most famous lottery millionaire, has just taken charge of a newly constructed €1.7m mansion at Lough Derg in Co Clare. The 10,000-sq-ft pile, also in cut stone and neo-gothic, comes with 38 acres overlooking the lake.
Even at the lower end of the market, one-off homes are getting bigger and ranchier.
A comparison of planning permissions for one-off homes granted in the third quarter of 2002 and the third quarter of 2005 (the latest available figures) shows that the average one-off home size in the mid-eastern region has increased in three years from 2,185 sq ft to 2,465 sq ft. In the southwest, the hike is from 1,990 sq ft to 2,300 sq ft, while the figure in the mid- west went from 2,217 sq ft to 2,370 sq ft, and the southeast jumped from 1,990 sq ft to 2,379 sq ft.
David Ashmore, a country home specialist with estate agent HOK Residential, says a number of key factors have sparked the McMansion phenomenon, not least a marked shortage of large period piles for sale.
“Even three years ago, a huge, old period home in a rural area would probably be bought by a hotel chain or turned into a golf club amenity. These days, those buyers are not even on the radar. These houses are being snatched up by private owners who want their own grounds. Today the vast majority of buyers are Dublin-based, although they may not be from Dublin originally, and they are buying up surrounding land rather than selling it off,” he says. Until recently, country homes with estates attached were usually broken up and sold in lots.
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Ashmore says the shortage of existing mansions, the search for privacy, improved transport links and technologies are the main causes of the recent DIY mansion boom.
“Privacy is the main consideration for the new country home buyers at the top end. They are making a lifestyle choice. They want to go somewhere where they are isolated and not accessible. That’s where the additional land comes in.”
The new trend is certainly not about saving money — Ashmore argues that it’s usually cheaper to buy an existing period mansion than build a new one to the same specifications. “The costs are phenomenal. But these people are super-rich and they might already have a large home in Dublin, London and the United States,” he says.
The growing use of the newest executive toy, the private helicopter, which cuts huge amounts off travel times to the country, also plays a part in the McMansions blitz.
But Duncan Stewart, both a well-known architect and a recognised environmentalist, is among those who are seething at the McMansion boom.
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“The McMansion owner is a rich person saying, ‘Look at me, I’m rich and I’ve made it.’ They pick a beautiful view and then go and dominate it by sticking an outsized monstrosity on the highest hill. They seem to be imitating the aristocracy of old in their need to dominate the landscape.
“The majority of these homes are badly designed, a thrown-together mix of widgets and gadgets and a load of historic styles with no understanding of what they’re doing.”
“As an environmentalist, I have to ask, what business has a small family living in a home 20 times more than an average family can comfortably exist in? A house that’s 20 times larger uses 20 times more energy to light and heat. The Irish taxpayer will be paying out the fine for not achieving the Kyoto CO2 emissions levels and in essence we’ll all be paying for people like this.”
But the view in the country where these homes are being built is often far removed from the sometimes city-based environmentalist slant.
An Taisce, which has featured prominently in objecting to local McMansions all over Ireland, seems to have had little success in objecting at council level, prompting some to say that rural councils reflect staunch local feelings about the rights of the individual to build what they want on their own land.
In Limerick, JP McManus is hugely respected. The attitude to his mansion is: “He’s a good guy, fair play to him, he deserves it and well done.”
Jim Connolly, spokesman for the Rural Dwellers Association, says: “I can’t understand why there’s a fuss. It’s human nature — for thousands of years the rich have demonstrated their wealth by putting up the biggest buildings, be it houses, churches or banks. What person who won the national lottery wouldn’t go out and buy or build the biggest house possible? “The aristocracy of old did it. The difference between then and now is that here in Ireland, we haven’t had the wealth to do it until now. So I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of it.”