Headfort
In 2004, Headfort,
Co. Meath, was selected by the World Monuments Fund (WMF) for
inclusion in its List of 100 Most Endangered Sites due to the
significant interest of its Robert Adam interiors and for the threat
posed to these by water ingress. Since that time, the Headfort Trust,
through funding from the WMF, the Heritage Council and the Department
of the Environment, Heritage & Local Government, has spearheaded
a conservation and research programme that has revealed an
extraordinary decorative scheme that had remained hidden for over 100
years.
In 2008 to celebrate
the Society’s 50th anniversary, events held by our Chapters in New
York, Palm Beach and London raised the funds required to restore the
original decorative scheme of the ‘Eating Parlor’, the greatest
of Robert Adam’s rooms in Headfort. Specialist decorators have been
working on this exciting project since November 2008 and are
scheduled to finish mid-spring.
Headfort was
constructed in the 1760s to the designs of the Dublin-based architect
George Semple (1700-1782) for Sir Thomas Taylour, later 1st Earl of
Bective (1724-1795). It lies above the River Blackwater, a tributary
of the River Boyne, just outside the early ecclesiastical town of
Kells in the northwest of Co. Meath.
From Kells the
approach road to Headfort is lined by high demesne walls and crosses
a fine triple arched bridge by Thomas Cooley (1740-1784) before
reaching the main entrance gates, also by Cooley. These lead to a
wooded avenue and past stable buildings, recently sympathetically
converted for residential use, to emerge at the front of the house.
Headfort was
renowned for its designed parkland that was laid out in the style of
Capability Brown with plantations of mature woodland and a serpentine
lake with manmade islands that are home to a collection of Asiatic
trees. A great parterre lawn with topiary hedges is overlooked by the
rear of the house. In recent years the parkland has been developed as
a golf course.
Semple’s design
for Headfort was one of a number produced for the site by Sir Thomas
Taylour and previously by his father. Prior to the adoption of a
final design both Richard Castle (1690-1751) and John Ensor had
prepared proposals for great Palladian houses whilst Sir William
Chambers, during the actual construction works, was commissioned to
produce a revised design that was never used.
The house was
completed using an adapted version of Semple’s design and
constructed using a local grey Ardbraccan limestone. It stands as a
three storey over-basement building of 11 bays with a three-bay
central breakfront and two-bay terminating breakfronts on its
entrance elevation. The garden elevation has a three bay central
breakfront with sweeping steps leading down to the parterre lawn.
Leading from either side of the house are long single storey wings.
With its restrained
neo-Classicism and grey monolithic appearance, the Duke of Rutland in
1789 described Headfort as a “long range of tasteless building”
whilst the author George Hardinge described it in 1792 as “more
like a college or an infirmary. Though justification may be found for
these remarks in considering the architecture of the building’s
exterior, they do no justice to its interior which establishes
Headfort as one of Ireland’s great houses.
Between 1771 and 1775, Robert Adam (1728-1792), the pioneering neo-Classical architect, was commissioned by the 1st Earl of Bective to design a suite of rooms for the newly completed house. Adam produced designs for the decorative treatment of the entrance and staircase halls and also designed an enfilade facing out onto the garden front that culminated in a great double height space with a flat coved ceiling that he called the ‘Eating Parlor’.
Adam’s designs for
Headfort survive today and are held in the Mellon Collection, Yale,
USA. These drawings illustrate the evolving design process for Adam’s
interiors and demonstrate how closely the completed works adhere to
the original designs. Of great interest are the designs for the
‘Eating Parlor’ which show an initial proposal to construct a
barrel vaulted ceiling instead of the flat deep coved ceiling
eventually built.
The ‘Eating
Parlor’ is an immense space that was formed by reconfiguring the
floor plan of the house and merging two rooms at ground level with
the rooms above these on the first floor. The room is lit by four
windows between which are situated pier glasses and pier tables.
These stand across from twin chimney pieces with overmantles
containing classical compositions by Antonio Zucchi which are
surmounted by drapery swags and panels of classical scenes. Mounted
between and to either side of the chimney pieces are wall panels
containing portraits and to either end of this wall are matching
doorcases. The outer end wall contains further wall panels whilst the
inner end wall contains matching doorcases and wall panels.
Adjoining the
‘Eating Parlor’ is the Saloon which was completed to Adam’s
designs with a central painted medallion of Bacchus and Ariadne
surrounded by eight small medallions of Classical heads and figures.
Opening from this room is the Chinese Drawing Room which was so
called for a set of three landscape papers on the north, east and
west walls that sadly no longer survive.
Adam’s drawings
for the staircase hall are also of considerable interest for showing
the original grand aspirations of both architect and client. These
drawings illustrate proposals for decorative treatments on all three
levels of this space along with a newly installed staircase. However,
the completed version stripped back Adam’s ambitious decorative
plans to include only the designs for the ceiling. Furthermore,
instead of the proposed tailored staircase, the original plain
mahogany staircase was retained though with simple moulds applied on
the underside. In a similar fashion, Adam’s designs for the
entrance Hall were also not executed as planned though the final
works left the room with a notable decorative ceiling.
Robert Adam’s work
in Headfort is of national significance for the calibre of the
designs he produced and also because it is the most significant of
only three Irish commissions with which he was involved. Little
survives of his other two Irish works: (i) Langford House, Mary
Street, Dublin, was the home of Bective’s father-in-law, the Rt
Hon. Hercules Rowley MP and is now the site of a shopping centre;
(ii) in the 1780s Adam was engaged by Clotworthy Upton, 1st Lord
Templetown, at Castle Upton, Co. Antrim, but much of his work was
lost through reconstruction works in the 20th century.
Today, whilst the
parkland at Headfort is owned by a golf club, the house is owned by
the Headfort Trust, a registered charity that leases the building to
a long established school. Following long periods of minimal
maintenance, the Headfort Trust has taken on the task of repairing
significant structural problems in the roof and addressing damp
problems that arose because of this. In doing so the Trust
successfully nominated the building to the WMF’s List of 100 Most
Endangered Sites which has opened up significant fundraising
opportunities. Since 2004 a programme of works has seen the
completion of repairs to the roof, chimney stacks and rain water
goods as well as other necessary works.
An investigation of
Adam’s original decorative interiors has been undertaken by
stuccodore and historic interiors specialist Richard Ireland in
addition to this. Through a painstaking process, Ireland took
hundreds of samples of paint from each of Adam’s rooms which were
subsequently microscopically analysed. This analysis allowed Ireland
to determine the colours used in the original decorative scheme and
also allowed him to build up a detailed picture of how each room
would have looked.
In the ‘Eating
Parlor’ it was found that the decorative scheme used mid and dark
green verdigris colours which tallied with those suggested in the
Adam drawings. However, the application of these colours was
undertaken in a varied and detailed manner which defies conventional
expectations. The original decorative treatment of the adjoining
Saloon ceiling showed a similarity to that of the ‘Eating Parlor’
but is not consistent with Adam’s drawings. In the Chinese room
standing at the end of the garden front enfilade, it was found that
the scheme used white, brown, violet as well as a mid-green
verdigris.
In the Stair Hall it
was found that the colour scheme applied to the ceiling shared
significant similarities to that in the ‘Eating Parlor’ with two
related green colours and a white relief. In contrast to the other
rooms, the scheme revealed in the entrance hall used plain colours
with a strong mid grey and white scheme unusually reflecting what is
considered a Palladian preference for a ‘stone’ decorative
treatment of entrance halls.
The Headfort
findings have generated an international level of interest amongst
Adam scholars and other architectural historians with lectures
delivered on the subject in Ireland, the UK and the USA. Eileen
Harris, author of The Genius of Robert Adam, has described the
discoveries as ‘unique, extremely interesting and very exciting’.
The original decorative scheme in the stair hall has already been
reinstated to stunning effect through funding from the WMF.
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