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Irish Manor with an American MannerAdare Manor, Limerick, IrelandBy Paul Pence
The Adare Manor treated my wife and me to a night’s stay during our honeymoon trip through the British Isles. Our adventures through Ireland and Scotland had included stays in farmhouses, a Church converted to a B&B, large family houses with guest rooms, a couple of very nice hotels, and the inevitable overnight stay with distant cousins. Adare, though was completely different. It was like spending the night in a palace, or perhaps like one of the amazing Newport mansions.
The bedroom was no less opulent with its fireplace, high ceilings, and a wonderful bay window looking out over the Maigue River and part of the golf course. The modest sized television stayed tucked out of sight in a cherry wood cabinet, leaving the room a tasteful display of polished woods and gold leaf.
We had three choices for dinner. Since the Kane family was hosting us for just the room, we could have wandered into town and taken our chances with the local “pub grub”, stay on the estate and have a casual dinner at the carriage house, or enjoy formal dining in the manor’s Oak Room. We went for the candlelight dinner – a fix prix meal of multiple courses and attentive service. We supped on lintel soup, lemon/thyme sorbet, salmon, oysters, and chocolate mousse, lingering over the food, making it an entire evening’s entertainment.
The servers were not from Ireland -- perhaps an indication of the growing prosperity of Ireland and the availability of other work, or perhaps a conscious decision of the Adare Manor management to bring in a “continental” restaurant staff from France to complement the French flavors and cooking methods of the dinner. Dinner, without wine and after conversion from Euros, cost us $200, which to us was significant, but to the clientele who expect only the best and pay over $1000 a night for one of the manor’s five top-of-the-line Dunraven staterooms, it’s nothing. After dinner we strolled the grounds, marveling at the gardens and river in the twilight that seemed to last all night, stopping for a while under a 300-year-old multi-trunked Lebanon cedar tree before visiting the manor’s basement bar. Hidden below the grand entry hall, the manor’s bar hides behind heavy wood doors. Broad arches span the room, echoing the notes of the single piano. “Where are you from?” the piano player asked. “Rhode Island…and Texas. Newlyweds.” It’s a small world, another couple was there from Rhode Island, also on their honeymoon trip. We didn’t stick around long, it was already past midnight and it was the last night of our trip, so we scurried back to our room.
Links: Pictures by Paul Pence Bio: Freelance writer Paul Pence and his wife Linda Eagleson explored Scotland and Ireland on their honeymoon. Together they produce Rhode Island Roads Magazine, exploring the tiny but multi-layered state where they have made their home. |
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TM
When the second Earl of Dunraven oversaw the building of
his 840 acre estate near Adare village, the extravagance of the sweeping manor
house with 75 fireplaces, 365 windows, and a 132-foot long gallery inspired by
the Versailles Hall of Mirrors needed a touch of modesty. So, along with the
gargoyles and stone filigree and arches and bay windows, he had three-foot stone
letters create a rail around the roof to spell out the words “Except the lord
build the house, the labour is but lost that built it”. False modesty, perhaps,
since Lord Dunraven claimed credit as the manor’s architect, making the Lord the
“builder” who used the labour of the Irish peasants during the great potato
famine. Today, observant visitors who step through Adare Manor’s turreted
entrance see a reminder in the great hall – a life-size statue, a caricature, of
an Irish peasant holding the weight of the building on his back. 
This comical figure may not have been part of the original
building, since the estate came completely stripped of furnishings when it was
purchased in 1987 by the Thomas F. Kane family to be turned into a world-class
luxury hotel. The complete renovation included antiques befitting the opulent
mansion, a few architectural elements like shield-bearing falcons perched on
railings around the reception hall, modernizing the 150-year-old building’s
plumbing, and the addition of an indoor swimming pool and conference center.
With the 230-acre Robert Trent Jones, Sr. golf course, fine dining in the
hotel’s restaurant, a full-service spa, and cozy basement pub, the Adare Manor
hosts luxury-seeking visitors from around the world behind their high walls and
guarded gates.
Our top-floor corner room was half the size of our modest
house. The bathroom was the size of the other half. Originally, they were
separate rooms, but the modernizing gave every guest room its own private bath,
even if it meant that the bathroom had two sinks, bathtub, toilet, bidet, a
fireplace, settee, and table, while still leaving enough empty space to play
tennis on the marble floor.
Tasteful, perhaps, is a better word than opulent. Opulent
infers gold and crystal simply because it’s available, while tasteful infers
that someone knows how to set limits. The Earl of Dunraven was a man who valued
opulence, putting 52 chimney stacks on the manor house just so that it had one
chimney for each week. The Kane family, however, are the ones who decided that
the bathroom would have a standard sized bath tub. The Earl would have put in a
monster made out of alabaster had ample running water been available in 1832.
Throughout our entire trip through the UK, I had been
unable to get iced tea. Water served at dinner was usually chilled “still
water”, not iced, and the concept of iced tea was foreign in this land of hot
tea and warm beer. But when I asked the waiters in Adare’s Oak Room, they said
“certainly”. Adare was owned by Americans and was a favorite of vacationing
American golfers, so of course they would have iced tea.
The next morning we scurried out to Dublin and the airport.
We didn’t have time to take in many of the Manor’s amenities. We hadn’t ridden
horses along their cross-country trails winding under ancient trees. We didn’t
have our travel tension massaged out at the spa. We didn’t fish in the Maigue
River. And we didn’t take the opportunity to play golf on that Robert Trent
Jones Sr. golf course. But we did take time to admire the American flag flying
outside the front door of this historical Irish manor, a tribute to the American
hotel owners who restored the manor and opened its doors to the world.