Seeing a sack of potential in the crumbling edifice that nobody else seemed to want back in 2002, she put her nose to the proverbial grindstone to transform a post-industrial curiosity into a stylish rural home.
In fact it is two separate homes in one, a one-bed and a three-bed on three-quarters of an acre of riverside property. And next month it will go under the hammer with an advised minimum value of €950,000.
In addition to being a home, the property will come with planning approval for use as a bar and restaurant, and, it has planning permission for a further two bedrooms.
It last came on the market for what might now be considered a snip, at just under €400,000. Back then, though, few people threw more than a cursory glance at the For Sale sign on the mid-18th-century building.
“I spotted it on the internet and it had been on the market for a long time,” says Lawlor. “Over the years it had been used as offices, as an art galley at one stage, and then as a home. There was a writer living there and he didn’t really have the money to do it up. He was really just living in part of the building.”
Advertisement
At the time, Lawlor was planning a move back to Ireland after 20 years in London, but didn’t much fancy the new, post-Celtic tiger Dublin and its inflated house prices.
“Dublin had changed so much since I had been away,” she says. “I didn’t really recognise it any more as the place I grew up in, and living in a big city like London for so many years really gave me a yen for country life.
“What really attracted me to Arland’s Mill was the light. One of the more positive things that had been done to it in the 1970s was that the windows had been enlarged, so it was really bright.”
Not all of Lawlor’s family were as enthusiastic about the move as she was.
She says: “My sisters thought I was insane. They couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t buy a nice bungalow in Foxrock or something like that. But for me, there was no comparison in the square footage you could get in Dublin and what you could get in the country for the same money.”
Advertisement
The previous owner was Peter Somerville-Large, the author of An Irish Childhood, as well as coffee-table tomes such as Irish Eccentrics and The Irish Country House. He had made it a comfortable enough, if rustic, home, but he never had the wherewithal to fully restore the property, so much of the interior had not been touched for years.
It ceased to operate as a corn mill in the 1930s and the wheel and most of the mechanics have been long since removed, though the millrace has survived intact.
Lawlor says it took an entire week just to vacuum out all of the cobwebs.
She stripped, sanded and polished the 3in-thick pine floors, had the basement of the building tanked, and the whole property rewired and replumbed. She also installed central heating. She reckons the bill for everything she has done would amount to “several hundred thousand euros”.
During the early stages of the renovation, Lawlor says she had some doubts of her own. “I would wake up in the middle of the night, both in fear because it was so quiet, and I didn’t feel 100% safe there at the time. Then I would look around the vast empty space and think to myself, ‘What have I done?’ Getting a dog helped. I felt a bit safer until I had the building properly secured. Even getting used to the peace and quiet after London was difficult.”
Advertisement
There were a few surprises. In the 1970s, when it was an office building, somebody had nailed chipboard to much of the floor. Lawlor stripped this back, not expecting the original boards to be still intact, but they were. She then set about tackling the building’s substantial damp problem.
She says: “Sanding back those floorboards was an immense pleasure. It was occasionally stressful, spending lots of money on things you never see like damp proofing. There were no really nasty surprises. I think it was a really ‘honest’ building in that respect. What you saw was pretty much what you got.”
For a couple of years Lawlor lived in one part of the mill while renting out the other. Eventually, she remarried and moved to Listowel, where she now lives and runs a pub and restaurant in the village. Her son lives in the mill full-time.
The main living accommodation is accessed though an original stone archway, which leads into an entrance lobby with exposed ceiling beams and railway sleeper steps up into a library.
There are stairs up to the first floor, where there is a large kitchen/breakfast room with four windows overlooking a weir on the river and French doors leading out on to the terrace. The kitchen has a large centre island, a huge American-style fridge and Neff cooking appliances. Also on this floor is a utility room, living room and drawing room.
Advertisement
The second floor has a gallery, office, bathroom and the master bedroom, which has an en-suite bathroom and a dressing room attached. The bedroom also overlooks the weir and the en suite has a spa bath and mosaic-tiled walls.
Lawlor says this was one of her favourite rooms to do. “I took great pleasure in putting in a bathroom you could actually walk around. This bedroom is the room that people really fall in love with when they see it.”
The second residence is accessed at first-floor level and has a living room, kitchen and utility room at that level, with three bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms at second-floor level. There are two vaulted basement areas underneath bringing the entire square footage up to about 7,000.
Though the mill has only oil-fired central heating at present, Lawlor says she had a survey done looking at the possibility of using the millrace as an alternative source of energy. She says: “If you put a turbine in, there would be enough power to heat all the hot water and heat the mill. It isn’t that difficult to heat anyway, because it is so well insulated.”
Lawlor thinks the property would lend itself perfectly to the idea of running it as a bar/restaurant. She has already held a couple of fundraising events there, with around 150 guests seated for dinner. Though it doesn’t have enough bedrooms to run viably as a guest house, Lawlor thinks it could make an English-style inn, with just a couple of rooms.
Advertisement
She has just bought Gurtenard House in Listowel, Co Kerry, one of the few original Georgian houses left in the kingdom. This one is a guest house, but, ironically, Lawlor’s plan is to turn it back into a family home.
Meanwhile, her mill is one of a number of such buildings in Thomastown. By no means the largest in the town, it was once known locally as “the little mill”.
Thomastown became an important centre for milling during the 17th and 18th centuries and was the main entry point for trade from Kilkenny city. The first planned town in Ireland, its streets were laid out in the 13th century to maximise the number of properties with street frontage.
Though the town went into decline in the mid-19th century, when the navigation between it and Inistioge silted up, it underwent something of a revival when artisan craftsmen began to move there in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in the establishment of the Grennan Mill Craft College in 1999.
A couple of minutes’ walk from the centre of Thomastown and about 20 minutes’ drive from Kilkenny city and 125km from Dublin, Arland’s Mill goes under the hammer on October 4.
Ganly Walters, 01 662 3255, www.ganlywalters.ie