Turtle Bunbury

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Loughcrew House, Co. Meath - Gilded Magnificence

Photographs by James Fennell.

When Charles and Emily Naper came into the Naper family's Irish estate, the task ahead must have been exceptionally daunting. Loughcrew House, the seat of Charles's ancestors for nearly 400 years, was no more than a shell. The once indomitable Georgian mansion had been the victim, some say, of an ancient curse. "Three times will Loughcrew be consumed by fire. Crows will fly in and out of the windows. Grass will grow on its doorstep". The last of the three fires took place in 1964, reducing the house to a state of roofless dereliction, its only tenant a Massey Ferguson tractor.

The young Napers were a determined couple. The original house was clearly beyond repair but that need not hinder them from building a new house. In 1982 they recruited the architect Alfred Cochrane and set about restoring what is now called The Orangery. The rooms that make up the house were originally the palm houses, the azalea houses and the furnace rooms.

The present hall was literally just a hole in the ground until the restoration. Today it serves as a warm and inviting entrance, painted a deep red to counteract Ireland's notoriously cold winters. Irish artist and family friend Michael Dillon was commissioned to paint a series of murals depicting Diana the Huntress and other mythological themes to lend a sense of artistic spirit to the hall. Dillon also devised the stunning trompe l'oeil murals in the patio area next door. The doors leading off the entrance hall were painted in a blue / gray colour wash and then oil gilded.

The main body of the house was a windowless single storey shed with, at either end, rooms with very tall ceilings and high windows. The shed, a vast space of 65 ft and 20 ft, now doubles as the sitting and dining room. Bright and airy in summer and cosy in winter, the walls are pale pink with a raspberry glaze while the pine floor is painted an uplifting yellow. The dinner service, glassware and silverware are cleverly stored in a pair of columns at the entrance, designed for the purpose by Cochrane. Emily's stamp on the room is everywhere. She remodeled the chintz curtains from bed covers, designed the dining room chairs and personally gilded the 19th century mirror and oil painting frames.

The exquisite gilded theme should come as no surprise to those familiar with the work of Emily Naper, Ireland's foremost gilding authority. A descendent of Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the original Hell Fire Club, she studied at the Ecole de Louvre and the City & Guilds in London before working as an apprentice to Vilmo Gibello. The old laundry has been converted into a studio where Emily restores frames and gilded furniture and manufactures a range of decorative accessories, ranging from piano stools and console tables to cherubs and photograph frames. She maintains that she can replace virtually any carved piece by using a special mould composition of rabbit skin, glue and very fine chalk.

Adjacent to the dining room is the Conservatory, formerly home to the Naper's azalea collection. The floor was covered with limestone slabs, the empty ceiling was given a new roof of wood and glass. The original walls were in surprisingly reasonable condition, perhaps a testament to their early Victorian creators who used a mixture of horse and cow hair, ox blood, plaster and brick. Today this room provides an alternative entrance to the house as well as a dining area in summer and a table tennis room for the Napers' children.

But it is the unbridled energy of the Napers which shines brightest at Loughcrew. With their children now at school, Loughcrew is open to paying guests. Every year, Emily's School of Gilding and Decorative Finishes is producing gilders of exceptional skill. They have also restored the magnificent gardens where, every summer, the high rollers of Irish society assemble to watch an outdoor opera. The setting is perfect for the area around Loughcrew boasts one of the most extensive prehistoric settlements in existence. The Loughcrew Hills have 32 passage graves featuring curiously decorated stones and dark tunnels in which the ashes of chieftains, dead for 6,000 years, await the rising sun. The most famous of these is the grave on Slieve na Caillighe ("The Hill of the Witch") where a celebrated hag held court in ancient times.

Today, all that remains of the original Loughcrew House is its entrance, subsequently reassembled to look like some sort of mini-Acropolis. But the achievement of Charles and Emily Naper has been nothing short of monumental. Their home stands testament to the ancient truism that when you put your mind to it, anything is possible.

See: www.loughcrew.com

This article appeared in Hong Kong's Home Journal in October 2003.

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