Address: Ballysallagh House, Kilkenny, Co Kilkenny
Price: €1,350,000
Agent: Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes/Sherry FitzGerald McCreery
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When Geralyn and Kieran White bought Ballysallagh House in 1987, “we signed first and went to an accountant later”, they laugh. Neither of them grew up in period homes, but they shared an interest in architecture and decorative arts. Kieran, a pharmacist in Kilkenny, had spent time as a young teenager in the unlikely hobby of looking at tower houses in the Kilkenny countryside. Geralyn had done an MA and PhD in museum studies and had worked in decorative arts in the National Museum of Ireland.
So when in 1987 they saw a small ad for Ballysallagh House, a dilapidated Georgian property built in 1722, they bought it. With three small children at the time, “it was bordering on lunacy” they say now. It needed everything, from clearing dry rot to replacing all windows, along with basics such as rewiring and replumbing, a job made more exacting by their absolute commitment to doing all this in keeping with its Georgian heritage.
They did this incrementally “on a shoestring” over the past four decades, and in 2020 won the first Heritage Houses of Ireland-O’Flynn Group Heritage Prize, an award that acknowledges the owner’s commitment to the preservation of buildings. Until very recently, the couple had no plans to leave Ballysallagh; they continued, for example, to commission new curtains from a fabric house in Venice. But Kieran retired from his pharmacy business and with grandchildren in Dublin, they were spending more time near the seaside there and decided it was time to move.
Now Ballysallagh House – a 559sq m (6,017sq ft) Georgian two-storey-over-garden-level home on five acres with four double bedrooms, one en suite, a large country kitchen, formal gardens designed and created by the Whites, four stables and other outbuildings – is for sale through Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes and Sherry FitzGerald McCreery with an asking price of €1.35 million.
The contents – Georgian furniture and commissioned pieces – will be sold separately, with Adams handling their sale.
A protected structure, the house has no Ber, but with oil-fired heating and an insulated attic floor, it’s not a cold house, they say. On a chilly March morning, the country kitchen, with its cream Aga, is cosy.
Even before its restoration, Ballysallagh House had been singled out as a rare example of an unspoilt early Georgian small country house by historians, including Maurice Craig and Dan Cruickshank.
A daffodil-lined driveway guides you to the house, where shallow cut-limestone steps lead to the original front door with a simple fanlight over it – echoed by a smaller lunette fanlight in the triangular pediment at the top of the entrance. Georgian architecture was all about symmetry and balance: Ballysallagh was built on what’s called the tripartite design, with formal reception rooms on either side of a central hall, with a very wide landing above, flanked by four double bedrooms.
A large fanlight tops double doors halfway along the wide front hall: both this and a matching glazed cabinet in the hall are thought to date from 1810, after which there were few changes made to the house. Floors here, like everywhere in the house, are original Baltic pine.
Front hall 
Drawingroom 
Sittingroom/study/library
The blue drawingroom has a Victorian white marble fireplace and tall windows framed by heavy blue curtains. They hang from original brass poles that had been painted white before being restored. Sash windows here, as everywhere in the house, were restored with original single-pane wavy glass. Geralyn points out a sofa that she had reupholstered recently with fabric from Gainsborough Silk in the UK, the company which provided fabric for the Downton Abbey TV series.
It’s hard to summarise the level of detail invested in decorating the house in sympathy with its past: there’s the original red carpet in the diningroom on the other side of the hall and an Irish Chippendale dining table, gold-coloured curtains in the morning room made by a Venetian weaving house, and wardrobes made using shutters as doors to replicate 18th-century wardrobes. Bright colours have been used in many rooms, mostly Farrow & Ball paints.
The diningroom opens into a bright, yellow morning room; a butler’s pantry behind the reception rooms has original shelving, a sink and a hinged serving table.
The large country kitchen at garden level has a terracotta-tiled floor, large cream Aga, cabinets painted a pale grey-green and, at its centre, a 10ft-long table made from Irish elm that came from the Killruddery estate in Co Wicklow; it was made by local craftsman Kieran Costello. French doors open from the kitchen on to a terrace, and there’s a utility room (with a new double fridge) and a bathroom at this level too – and a good-sized sittingroom/study/library: Kieran Costello used salvaged materials to create the bookshelves that line its walls.
A quirky original “shoe cricket”, designed to remove dirt from shoes, sits at the foot of the stairs to the second floor. A tall arched window at the top of the stairs looks over the Italianate garden below, and several more steps lead to the very wide landing above: it’s sittingroom as much as landing, with a window overlooking the front garden and the fields.
The bedrooms, all doubles, have similar furnishings, with sleigh beds, and all with wardrobes. The main bedroom is painted a deep blue, with a tapestry above the bed; a modern en suite bathroom has pale yellow subway tiles. There’s a small walk-in dressingroom with a low arched window and, off the stairs leading up to the attic, a space for storing fabrics. There’s a lot of potential in the large high-ceilinged attic for new owners to expand.
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The couple’s attention to detail carried on into the design of the gardens: high hedges surround the formal gardens with sculpted beech, box and yew at the back of the house, with old green gates to lead into them. A Roman garden has statuary among the box hedges; elsewhere, a gap in a tall hedge opens on to parkland. A maple walk at the side of the house, lined by trees planted 40 years ago, will be filled with bluebells come May. An outbuilding at the back of the gardens, built by the Whites but looking like a period building, has stables, storage and a motor house. There’s a Georgian ha-ha – a sunken wall – in the front garden.
The couple funded the restoration pretty much by themselves: government grants for replacing windows were axed just a year after they bought, and with just four bedrooms they deemed the house too small to take in guests. But after contacting the Irish Georgian Society, they did earn some income from hosting tours by (usually) wealthy Americans. Ballysallagh has been featured by prestigious magazine Architectural Digest, and included in tours run by an American authority on British and Irish country houses, Curt DiCamillo. (One visitor turned out to be Melania Trump’s designer.)
So who might buy such a house?
Sherry FitzGerald Country Homes agent Roseanne De Vere Hunt says in recent weeks, the agency has “received plentiful enquiries from the US market and I feel that Ballysallagh House will particularly appeal to these buyers, due to the fantastic condition of the property”.
Diningroom 
Morningroom 
Kitchen 
Utility room 
Upstairs landing 
Main bedroom 
Formal garden