Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Turn through the gates of Altidore Castle, an austere crenellated 30-room property built around 1730 for English army general Thomas Pearce in County Wicklow, and the light is lingering on the gold, copper and russet trees lining the driveway. Inside sits Thomas Emmet, a descendant of the older brother of executed 18th-century Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet. Emmet\u2019s family bought the property in 1944, but the heir sees himself not just as a custodian of Altidore \u2014 rather something bigger. He is the next generation co-ordinator at Historic Houses of Ireland, which represents 200 properties from the medieval to Edwardian eras; he is carving out a role helping owners of Ireland\u2019s grand mansions, dubbed \u201cBig Houses\u201d, \u201cmove with the times\u201d. It is a rocky road. These homes were built for the landed Anglo-Irish elite from the late 16th to the 19th centuries. With a heavy baggage of colonialism \u2014 including exploitative rents and their owners\u2019 financial splurging after the devastating mid 19th-century potato famine \u2014 the Big House was often seen as the \u201cProtestant house on the Catholic hill\u201d. Some 300 were torched by republicans, mostly during the 1919-21 war of independence and 1922-23 civil war.Out of place and out of time in the new Irish Free State, some Big Houses were sold and their contents scattered, or turned into government buildings, schools, hospitals, hotels, even prisons; Altidore was temporarily a TB sanatorium. Others were left to rot or were demolished.These properties can feel light years away from the multicultural Ireland of today and its priorities. A century on from the torchings, and two decades after the frenzy of the Celtic Tiger property boom, Ireland\u2019s housing shortage is a key voter concern as the November 29 general election approaches. Until recently, many Irish were content to let the sometimes decaying mansions slide into oblivion \u2014 relegating them, as architectural historian Robert O\u2019Byrne puts it, to \u201cwhite elephants\u201d in a country that had moved on. But \u201cthere is unfinished business,\u201d he says. \u201cA reckoning with Ireland\u2019s past\u201d. There\u2019s a curiosity that wasn\u2019t there before\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009We\u2019re only at the start of the reappraisal of the country house in Irish historyA newfound appreciation is emerging for the architecture and craftsmanship represented by the Big House, as places to visit, as hotels and event venues or \u2014 for those with deep pockets \u2014 properties to be restored. With Ireland\u2019s newfound wealth, garnered from its transformation in recent decades into a mecca for global tech and pharma companies, the neglect of country houses is \u201cno longer the only or even necessarily the most frequent option\u201d, O\u2019Byrne says. \u201cInstead the possibility of a new life [for them] has become viable.\u201dIn his new book The Irish Country House \u2014 a New Vision, he highlights 15 rarely seen properties whose rescue, restoration and revival seek to tell a \u201cnew story and present a new Ireland\u201d.They include Ballysallagh in County Kilkenny \u2014 a grey stone property with a formal Italianate garden built in 1722 on land that once belonged to the family of composer Henry Purcell. The house was passed through the family, largely unaltered, until it was sold in 1940. The sale dispersed most of the furnishings and by the time Kieran and Geralyn White bought Ballysallagh in 1987, it was dilapidated. The couple\u2019s restoration project carefully reintroduced period pieces and landscaping that have returned the house to its 18th-century grandeur. \u201cIt\u2019s a challenge to take on restoration of a historic property,\u201d says O\u2019Byrne, who has done much to raise public appreciation of their architecture and craftsmanship in more than a dozen books and his Instagram account, The Irish Aesthete, with its 38,400 followers. \u201cIt takes a particular kind of madness \u2014 it\u2019s not for everyone.\u201dBut not everyone has to: the Irish are re-examining their heritage by visiting country houses in ever increasing numbers. Historic Houses of Ireland says the number of properties open during this year\u2019s annual Heritage Week was up 40 per cent on last year, with record visitor numbers. \u201cIreland has matured as a nation over the past 30 to 40 years\u201d \u2014 in part, because of increased travel, says Anne O\u2019Donoghue, chief executive of the Irish Heritage Trust. \u201cIrish people have started to appreciate the wonderful architecture that\u2019s in our midst. The less nuanced understanding of the [Big House] history has evolved.\u201dTerence Dooley, director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, sees \u201ca curiosity there that wasn\u2019t there before\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009We\u2019re only at the start of the reappraisal of the country house in Irish history.\u201dTom Somerville, a barrister who grew up in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Syria but made his career in England, sits in the light-filled drawing room of Drishane. He is the ninth generation of his family to live in the grey brick Georgian home in West Cork overlooking the sea, since it was built in 1780. If you\u2019re Anglo-Irish, you have to decide in the end which side of the hyphen you go to. I always knew I was going to come backBeside the piano, glass doors open on to a lawn that rolls towards the bay. The walls are crammed with paintings and portraits \u2014 many by the house\u2019s most famous occupant, the writer Edith Somerville, who ran it during the tumultuous revolutionary period. Tom is the grandson of her nephew and spent his summers there as a boy before moving to Drishane with wife Jane and two sons in 2007. \u201cIf you\u2019re Anglo-Irish, you have to decide in the end which side of the hyphen you go to,\u201d he says. \u201cI always knew I was going to come back.\u201dThe Big House \u201chas its place now \u2014 partly because it is no longer the symbol of power\u201d, he says. Like many Big Houses, Drishane avails of tax breaks through opening to the public, typically for 60 days a year. The Somervilles also rent the house out in the summer \u2014 often to Americans or for weddings \u2014 and run three holiday cottages on their land.\u201cYou need money coming in,\u201d Tom says bluntly. \u201cIf it\u2019s not, you\u2019ve had it\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009People think you must be made of money \u2014 you\u2019re not, because you have a place like this.\u201dDrishane, with its wide entrance hall, octagonal study, original 19th-century wallpaper \u2014 crumbling in places \u2014 and family \u201cmementos\u201d including a dinosaur tooth in a glass cabinet and an emperor\u2019s roof tile from Peking, is one of around several dozen Irish houses still in the hands of their original families (Dooley estimates 30; O\u2019Byrne says the received wisdom is less than 100). Somerville says that direct connection prevents them from being \u201cjust a room \u2014 with a nice view, but just a room\u201d.But it\u2019s a big undertaking: in 2018, the descendants of the family that had owned Howth Castle on the north Dublin coast for eight centuries finally called it a day. The contents were auctioned off in 2021 in a sale billed as \u201c800 years of history \u2014 entire clearance\u201d.\u201cThe easiest thing to do with a house like this is to sell it and go off and live in a bungalow \u2014 and they do do that,\u201d says Somerville. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be the one to sell it.\u201d But he admits that \u201cif in the end it becomes a burden\u201d for his children, \u201cit will have to go. You can\u2019t spend your life devoted to a house, no matter how beautiful.\u201dThese storied houses periodically come on the market. Ryanair boss Michael O\u2019Leary bought and remodelled the mid 19th-century Gigginstown House in County Westmeath and John Collison, co-founder of Irish fintech company Stripe, owns Abbey Leix in County Laois, built by English architect James Wyatt in the late 18th century (such was Wyatt\u2019s standing that he is buried in Westminster Abbey). O\u2019Leary reportedly paid \u00a3580,000 for his 1,000-acre property in 1998; in 2021 Collison paid around \u20ac20mn for his 1,120-acre estate, according to the Irish Times. Few transformations are as extensive as that undertaken by Mexican-born Allen Sangin\u00e9s-Krause at 18th-century Killua Castle in County Westmeath, which features in O\u2019Byrne\u2019s book. The London-based investment banker fell in love with the ruin \u201cat first sight\u201d in 1999: with no roof and a tree inside, it had been abandoned for more than half a century.He has spent two decades reimagining it, geothermally heating the house and installing solar panels and a small wind turbine, and filling it with his collection of medieval and early Renaissance art and furnishings, including a table believed to have been made from a Spanish ship wrecked in 1588. The result, O\u2019Byrne says, is a \u201crepository of the past\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. a home for the 21st century. It also manages to be quite unlike anywhere else.\u201dAs O\u2019Donoghue of the Irish Heritage Trust puts it, \u201cheritage is not a static thing\u201d.The Blue Book lists castles, manors and other Big Houses to visit or hire for events. Take Ballyfin, in County Laois, now a hotel (and recently in the news after a guest was killed there; his son has been charged with his murder); the Regency mansion and its Capability Brown-inspired landscaped grounds, were bought by an US businessman two decades ago after it had been turned into a school, and sumptuously restored \u2014 including original parquet floor from the 1820s \u2014 at a cost of tens of millions of euros.Big Houses and the cultural repositories they represent remain vulnerable. \u201cWe are still losing them,\u201d says O\u2019Byrne. But Emmet, who is 31, is optimistic. \u201cAltidore is going to outlive me,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s quite a nice way to face one\u2019s mortality.\u201dJude Webber is the FT\u2019s Ireland correspondent Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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