Love and Laurentinum: One couple's crusade to conserve an 18th Century manor house
Open for Heritage Week, visits a Georgian house in North Cork being restored on a shoe-string budget by its very committed owners.
Eileen Magner Smith laughs in her soft, musical way: “I suppose this place left its mark on me from an early age. My sisters and I had our bedrooms in the basement, and I was bouncing on a car seat and fell against a brass tap.” She points to a faint ding in the arch of her dark eyebrow.
Laurentinum House c1740, its lodges and outbuildings are listed on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage. The main house, with yards as vast as a village, is a striking two-storey over-half basement, six bay Georgian manor house, built along with its ‘model farm’ by a junior branch of the Creagh family associated with this area of Doneraile.
Work on the handsome behemoth is being managed with hearty slices from two modest salaries and a slow, occasional drip of heritage grants under the guidance of conservation engineer Chris Southgate, of Southgate Associates whose portfolio includes Elizabeth Fort, Farmleigh House and Blarney and Birr castles.
Laurentinum House, and its lands, was bought by Eileen’s grandfather in the 1920s. The first new roof with projecting eaves was ‘thrown together’ in the 1840s as Chris Southgate describes it, balanced on a course of rubble-stone, flexing with the weather and allowing the rain straight inside.
By the 1960s three generations of Magners were toughing it out in increasingly bleak, damp and smoky conditions. Matriarch, Kathleen, finally broke ranks, suggesting a bungalow be built on the avenue. By the 1970s the family had decamped.
When Eileen married Michael Smith in 1995, they moved straight into Laurentinum, stabilising the house despite the financial constraints of not even having the title deeds.
Her father James might have turned his back to Laurentinum to concentrate his energies on progressive farming, but he had instinctive misgivings when PVC salesmen suggested he rip out the sashes (later restored with grant aid from The Irish Georgian Society). The house was sleeping, partly derelict, but not yet a ruin.
There were back- and bank-breaking jobs demanded at Laurentinum. Patient, centred and in-the-moment, the Smiths’ steady unspoiled excitement after 23 years tackling the ‘adventure’ of their self-described money-pit, is humbling. Time alone is gold.
Eileen works as an SNA, Michael is a manager at Dairygold. The extraordinary feature of this successful ongoing restoration is not only feeding out of funds from ordinary moderate wages, but the physical conditions endured by the family.
Michael, Eileen and their two children — Georgina (19) and James (11), lived in one large downstairs room for 10 years and two rooms for a further six years with the use of one working bathroom.
There is still no heating in Laurentinum — bar space heaters and open fires. Chris Southgate’s partner, Dr Karen Lysaght has only recently seen Eileen unmuffled in a coat indoors.
Breaching ragged entrance gates, an early 19th century gate lodge crouches in scaffolding, a period overture of the main event to passing and visiting gentry. The gothic metal window frames based on the fragments recovered on the site will be recreated and replaced — “forensic evidence” Chris explains, “that could have so easily ended up in a skip”.
Following restoration part-funded by the Built Heritage Investment Scheme, the family propose Airbnb accommodation. Chris has suggested a sleeping loft that won’t interfere with the simple Georgian layout.
The drive is snaking, pitted and passing a second ‘chaise’ lodge, we press through ancient cedars into close proximity to the house. At one time, the property included a hill of 60 acres of formal gardens. Primary records show that Laurentinum was lowered by a full storey in the 1840s to deliver a more Victorian appearance. A full wing was also demolished to the rear of the house.
Chris finds these changes important indicators that the family were under serious financial stress. “Lowering the house was cheaper than fixing the existing roof. That said, they made a mess of it — with unforeseen consequences years later.”
Eileen has found a paper trail showing that the family at Laurentinum were forced through the courts — circumstances that may have reduced their ability to keep their home in good repair.
Shaved back to lime render, this stately survivor may appear rude and raw, but experienced eyes will pick up on the careful skill that tipped it back from dereliction.
This includes window repairs, a new roof, and the reinstatement of the original ground level with French drains girdling the house. The vertical pose of Laurentinum remains impressive, its glorious 18th-century window proportions staged around a 19th century three-bay portico reached by boot-worn limestone steps, still bald of railings.
“This is where the story of this house starts,” Chris declares. He asks us to enter into the Georgian mindset, to imagine mincing up the steps in the early 1800s in our trailing gowns, discreetly wowed by the swing-in, gun-stock mahogany glazed entrance doors, (more grant-aid here from the Georgian Society). We would have noted the fashionable changes in the French manner of 1810 in the hall beyond – airy mouldings and light glazing bars – investments intended to impress. Chris points to the quality of the joinery – “These details mattered — they spoke.”
Where money didn’t allow for the switching of early Georgian reeded doors to later, fielded panels and surrounds, the rear of the house was left alone. These changes chart the style story of the Creaghs, and hint at what mattered to these people — how they shuffled their priorities. The pinched income preserved architectural treasure for Chris and the Smiths.
How did Michael Smith feel faced with a damp, dilapidated Georgian pile?
“I had always lived in old places,” Michael recounts flatly, “It made no odds to me.”
Michael has become completely invested in Laurentinum, scouring the country for salvage materials.
“Michael’s done batching of the slates for our ‘random’ slating of the roof. The OPW would be faint at this level of best practice,” says Chris. “‘He’s had to sort the slate for size, thickness, soundness, and judge any level of decay. It’s actually the best slating job I’ve seen in 30 years of practice as a conservation engineer, and that includes my €30m projects.”
“Not everyone gives value to the originality and texture of an old building like I do and like Michael and Eileen do,” Chris continues, “they understand that restoration alone is worthless. The building has to have functionality. They have a great commitment and have made real year-on-year sacrifices.
“The bank couldn’t loan them money on a house they did not own — holidays, savings, wages from their two jobs were all thrown into the project. They have become conservation enthusiasts and attend the Irish Georgian Society events regularly.”
Stepping into the downstairs great hall, Laurentinum retains a soulful atmosphere, but it’s not one of weeping walls, water penetrations, dry rot, rain dancing into buckets and fungal curiosities. Rather, the air inside is fresh, positively charged, tinged with beeswax, toasting bread and a little fresh plaster. This house is not just weather-tight – it’s breathing again.
The space includes shouldered architraves from the 1740s matched to modern (1810) insets and reeded panels. Distressed, authentic furnishings, some found in the house, others picked up at Aiden Foley’s in Doneraile, are set sparely, gilded in the glow of a yellow Farrow & Ball tone to the walls. New, fielded-panel, double doors have been fitted in a mannerly Georgian separation of the front and back of the house.
In the sitting room with its fine Rococo ceiling, we can see that the influence of available money, what Chris terms the ‘tension and release’ in subtle Georgian changes in the joinery. Shutters with fielded panels were added, but the early windows left as they were.
The magnificent 18th-century staircase lit by its twelve-over-eight window and a fan light was tightened, structurally repaired and cladding was used to recreate new fielded panelling.
A jagged hole marks the point where their son’s practice with a sliotar punctured their lofty fenestration. A baby grand piano with early octaves, sits in the embrace of the staircase, as it has in living memory. The period Baltic pine treads are now glossy gold, reinstated complete with the rub of centuries of ascending footfall.
Beneath the stairs, a North West corner marks the location of a 17th-century tower house, signaled by a window with a simple upright bar — the timbers removed and replaced, could be carbon-dated, emphasising the place of archaeological investigation in this project. There are two more arrow-loop windows in the basement. Chris explains: “This was a defended domestic building in its first incarnation. At the time that was here, masons were the highest paid skilled labourers in the realm.
“Lives depended on good masonry. Screws and hinges can tell you the date of a building. This is not hit and miss. We’re not guessing. These finds allow us to do a scholarly restoration.”
Chris employs three archaeologists in his firm and informing her enthusiasm, Eileen studied archaeology in UCC in her young days. She understands concepts like continuity-of-settlement and the importance of artefacts. She wrestled a copy of Jim Larkin’s Irish Worker from behind the stair panelling and has preserved charred fragments of 18th-century plans of the house behind glass.
Back in the kitchen, we devour hanks of ham rolled into bread, while Lyric FM trills out from a radio immersed in the Smiths’ tangled Museum of Found Things of Laurentinum.
Contractor Conor Hannon takes a well-deserved break from some or other, dusty labour. His father worked with James Magner during his stewardship and Conor has learned ancient and new skills and is clearly emotionally involved with the house.
A fifty-foot chestnut tree planted in 1918 in memory of the death of a son of the house, Arthur Cuming, on the Western Front, clouds the views to the North.
The complex of outbuildings beyond sits on a stirring sea of original cobbles. It aches for restoration, but has been structurally secured and is in a safe holding pattern. Together with fine lawns, Eileen and Michael are re-establishing formal beds, with vegetable and fruit crops in the walled garden behind the house, where the young Eileen once grazed her ponies.
She confides that she hopes to return to her childhood haunt and turn the basement into her kitchen (“my lair” she giggles). Here the 18th-century adze-hewn beams support the floors above (now with a little 21st century help).
“There were no power tools when they built this house,” Chris explains. “These timbers had to be split and shaped from live trees. Just looking at this wood, unpacks more stories. Slow growing Baltic pine was brought in by sea. Shipbuilding and house building had much in common from a carpenter’s point of view – a roof is just an inverted ship — both holding off water.”
We all chatter, point, reaching up to the haggard beams. New lime/gypsum plaster and skim glows from arches and walls. There’s a real friendship here that has slipped the bounds of a standard professional to client relationship. Chris, Kate and the Smiths are about to holiday together.
“We found Chris and his team on the Heritage Council list many years past now, it all started from there,” says Eileen.
“They saved us so much time, money and the experience of two steps forward one step back by showing us how to do things properly from the start. We always loved the house.”
The singular fortune of Laurentinum Houses is that it came to the right hands, hearts and minds at two minutes to midnight.
