At Ballyfin, stone walls enclose 600 acres of parkland, a lake and ancient woods, delightful garden buildings, follies and grottoes. The landscape, laid out in the mid-eighteenth century, is among the finest examples in Ireland of the natural style of gardening inspired by ‘Capability’ Brown. Among other highlights are the medieval-style tower, built as a folly in the 1860s, and the walled gardens.

The house has long been admired as the most lavish Regency mansion in Ireland and, after eight years of restoration, Ballyfin re-opened in May 2011 as a small country house hotel like no other. It offers the very best of Irish hospitality in the most beautiful surroundings imaginable. The house has been furnished with a collection of Irish art and antiques from around the world, fine Irish Mahogany, French chandeliers and mirrors by Thomas Chippendale. The result is spectacular, and today one of Ireland’s most endangered great houses has emerged ready for the current century, a place of grandeur, yet warm, providing the kind of welcome envisaged when the house was first built.

The house itself was built in the 1820s for another Sir Charles Coote to designs by the great Irish architects Sir Richard and William Morrison. The Cootes enjoyed the house for exactly one hundred years, employing a large team of servants to preserve the life of refined leisure that is documented in Edwardian photographs showing tea on the terrace or skating in the walled garden. As the political situation changed with the dawning of the Irish Independence, the Cootes sold the estate to the Patrician Brothers who, for much of the twentieth century, ran a much-loved school at Ballyfin.