Bewley's on Grafton Street closes shop

Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street in Dublin is closing its doors for refurbishment this afternoon.

The landmark café originally opened in 1927 and is now embarking on a major redevelopment plan. The building originally housed an elite school, but was repurposed into a café modelled after iconic cafés of European cities.

It originally cost £60,000 to build in 1927 - that's more than €15m in today's money.

140 staff are being laid off, as previously announced, and Bewleys plans to hire 70 people when it reopens.

The company had said the café's refurbishment was "an initiative to secure its long term future on Grafton Street where the café has a massive rent burden (of €1.5m) and is currently significantly loss-making (at a rate of €1.2m per year)".

The rent was described in the statement as "a legacy of the unsustainable Irish property bubble" and the company said a third party arbitrator established a market-reflective rent in January 2012 of €728,000 per year, "but the higher rent still prevails".