In the Houses of Ireland

Like New Very Large Hardcover, 256 unmarked pages, First Edition, 1988. Beautiful large format book celebrating Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian Big Houses. Post is €7 in Post Greenbag can also include 5 more books Postfree

The living history of houses yields myriad clues to the understanding of a land and its people. This is perhaps most true for Irish houses which, in their splendid isolation. have evolved without plan, allowing the evocative layers of the past to remain.

In the Houses of Ireland examines the wide variety of Irish styles, Irish homes, and Irish personalities. Walter Pfeiffer and Marianne Heron usher us into such magnificent homes as Lambay Castle, designed by Edwin Lutyens and maintained in its original Arts and Crafts splendor. They invite us to witness a once-stately Georgian town house now undergoing a loving restoration. We visit small homes and large: the tiny Glebe house in remote Donegal is filled with color and the fantasy of painter Derek Hill; Castletown Cox, home of the Baron and Baroness de Breffny, rings with splendour.

Here are cottages and castles, town houses and retreats. A house may look across a lough to a patchwork of fields or may sit on a clifftop swept bare by Atlantic winds-but one thing is consistent: all these houses express a distinctly Irish sensibility. And whether filled with exquisitely restored plasterwork, incredible "Gothick" ceilings, col-lections of dolls, or "museums" of curiosities collected over the years, they speak as eloquently about Ireland and their owners' personalities as did Joyce and Yeats when giving voice to their country and their countrymen.

With more than 250 photographs, In the Houses of Ireland will delight the eye. Its text will give great pleasure-whether the reader is in search of a chronicle of design and style or of fascinating historical anecdotes and details. This is a book that will captivate with its feasts for the eye and the imagination as it tells its tales of the past's present..