The Great House Revival

Hugh Wallace meets people transforming derelict properties into modern home, beginning with an Australian cabinet maker restoring a Co Mayo house with 110 rooms.

Murray Rees has always wanted to live in an elegant old townhouse and couldn’t believe his luck when he found one he could afford in North Inner City Dublin. Buildings in this area were used as bedsits and had fallen into total disrepair. Murray is keen to save this 1840s building and return it to its full potential.

Ronan Fitzpatrick and his fiancé Mary Rahill are restoring a local two-room schoolhouse built in the 1890s as their family home. It has extra significance for Ronan as he and his father before him went to school there as children.

Irene McDermott has a strong personal connection to the cottage she is restoring on the Inishowen Peninsula in Co.Donegal. Her great, great, grandmother lived here and it has been in her family since famine times.

Goretti Foreau and her French husband, Eric, have decided that now that their older kids are in college, they want a lifestyle change and so they are moving lock, stock and barrel from Dublin city to the rolling hills of Rathrum, Co. Wicklow. They’ve bought an old farmhouse and agricultural outbuildings that need significant and extensive restoration work to become habitable.

Belfast born Garry and Anne Wilson have lived and worked in the UK all of their adult lives. They have always wanted a base in Ireland and in 2016 they were in the market for a restoration project and came across Belvelly Tower House in Cobh Co Cork.