So glitzy you could almost bump into the Great Gatsby

YOU could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked on to a movie set — say, the Great Gatsby — when you pull up at the entrance to the Capella Castlemartyr Resort: it is a set-dressed timepiece and package, aimed at the wealthy and those seeking to unwind, and prepared to pay for the privileges.

Themed to have a ‘between the wars’ ambience and atmosphere, the €80 million investment is an act of faith in the maxim ‘as you sow, so shall you reap’.

Touches include the old-style bikes at the door, free for guests to wheel their way around the 220 acres, there’s a carriage and driver with two Kerry bog ponies in harness for the same sort of trip, only with commentary, a flat-bottomed punt for boating and angling trips on the lake (complete with resident swans for balletic impressions) and, coming up shortly, an Aston Martin, a Bentley and Land Rover for guests use. !

If you want to do the dog on it, the hotel has two lively young Irish red and white setters, Earl and Countess, which you can take out for walkies and companionship of the type that doesn’t answer you back, or ask you if you are having a good or bad day.

As a five-star hotel, spa, golf course, holiday lodges and resort package, the east Cork Castlemartyr hotel bravely developed and delivered by Barry Supple, with Horst Schulze of the Capella group as hotelier/ visionary, pitches itself into exalted company, such as Ashford Castle, the K Club, the Merrion, Dromoland and Sheen Falls, the bar has been set high. On the basis of its delivery within the first month of opening, the omens look good.

The package already has maturity and marketability very much on its side, which makes selling the message an easy one for the no less than four PR firms involved in promoting it, one in Cork, one in Dublin, one in Britain and one Stateside, whence a good proportion of guests are expected to come.

Even greater than the sum of its parts, Capella Castlemartyr includes a period manor house whose long history from the 17th century included a stint as a boarding school, a castle associated with the Earls of Cork and the Knights Templar, a bell tower also several centuries’ old, which serves as a design motif for the restaurant, and a parkland setting with mature woodland and a near screening of mature yews, which only time, not money, can deliver.

Much has been made of the deliberately high-end pricing, with afternoon tea at €35 (but with decks of delicacies on trays, so that it all ends in tiers), and rooms starting from €540 per night, and 800 sq ft suites at €1,450 a night. The Presidential Suite is, well, regal. It overlooks the shimmering box hedging and gravel parterre gardens and the Ron Kirby-designed links style golf course and its mounds and berms, and this suite alone has a decadent 3,000 sq ft of space, with the 8’ wide bed taking up only a chunk of this palatial suite.

It also has a formal dining room, drawing room, book-lined study with bound volumes of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, private sauna, and a dramatic internal corridor with Gothic vaulted ceilings. If you have to ask the price, you’re clearly not presidential material....

(OK so, €2,750 a night, or €3,250 if you want a third bedroom opened up.)

The hotel, with a small number of suites in the original manor residence and the rest in the purposely contrasting new wing, which is quite a trek away, done in timber, glass and dark stone, has the leisure centre and spa, with feature glass sculpture by Turner Glass, a glitzy pool overlooking the grounds and exteranl water feature as well, between the old section and the new (design of the integrated whole is by Reddy O’Riordan Staehli Architects, with Jack Coughlan Associates having overseen the conservation work in the old house. Up to 400 people worked on it in its final delivery, done in a quite record 18 months.

It has 109 bedrooms or suites, designed by New York-based Peter Silling of Hotel Interior Design (HID), with all services controlled by a smart pad beside the bed, hidden in a locker and with heavily marbled and over-sized bathroom suites, with wireless web access throughout the hotel, at hidden variance with the genuinely relaxed old-world feel.

When plans for Castlemartyr were revealed, in the midst of a glut of new hotel openings, they came with PR reams about levels of standard and comfort, special features, a place apart and that sort of rhetoric. It has lived up to it all, right down to its 16,000 sq ft spa centre with treatments modelled on the phases of the moon....even if you could only afford the full Capella package once in a blue moon.