Carton: history and hospitality on a grand scale
Surrounded by 1,100 acres of parkland twenty-four kilometers west of Dublin, Carton is architecturally and historically Ireland’s premier country house. Having served for centuries as the home of the Earls of Kildare (later Dukes of Leinster), since the 1970s Carton has operated as a hotel and golf club. In 2018 its new owners Belmullet Hospitality commissioned the Dublin architectural practice of McCauley Daye O’Connell to carry out a major refurbishment, beginning with upgrading the hotel’s 150 bedrooms.
For the rooms in the Georgian main block, the design team embraced historic Irish wallpaper patterns as a means of encouraging guests to engage with the heritage of the building, highlighting the individual architectural character of the rooms and suites, and helping to convey the atmosphere of a country estate. The colour pallette chosen by the design team favoured rich blends of strong, often deep colours, producing warm, vibrant schemes which compliment the architecture without descending into historical pastiche.
Over a six-month period between December 2019 and June 2020, I supplied a total of 418 rolls of wallpaper for 24 rooms in Carton, the majority hand printed – easily the largest single order of my career. The list of patterns included a first printing of a magnificient Regency damask found in Carton, and a specially commissioned digital version of a large chintz-style floral trail, based on fragments of eighteenth-century wallpaper which had once adorned the walls of a bedroom in nearby Castletown House.
Adjacent to the gold and white Saloon with its exuberant stucco ceiling, the most eye-catching wallpapered space in Carton is the barrel-vaulted dining room designed in 1815 by the Cork-born architect Richard Morrison, and now called the ‘Morrison Room’. To match the highly enriched plasterwork, scagliola and joinery, a new version of the ‘Lissadell’ damask was created and printed in ivory, gold and china blue.
The spirit of its first chatelaine Emily Fitzgerald, Countess of Kildare, can still be felt in Carton, despite the trappings of modern luxury. It was she who in 1759 created the Chinese Bedroom on the ground floor which still boasts its original wallpaper, hand-painted in China. Emily and her husband James, Earl of Kildare, were strong supporters of Irish manufactures and would, I hope, have approved of the choice of patterns used in their former home.
