Luggala explores "the scandals, intrigues, and heartbreaking beauty of one of Ireland's grandest homes" (Mitchell Owens, Wall Street Journal) that has bewitched the imagination of poets, rock stars, dreamers, and the aristocracy alike.
Nestled in a secluded Irish valley, Luggala is an exquisite eighteenth-century house at the centre of a 5,000-acre estate. In 1937 Ernest Guinness presented Luggala to his youngest daughter, Oonagh, who described Luggala as "the most decorative honey pot in Ireland" and made it the centre of a dazzling social world that included painters, poets, scholars, and socialites. In the late 1960s she passed the estate to her son, the Hon Garech Browne.
Robert O’Byrne recounts this fascinating story, which celebrates both the unique beauty of this place and the many celebrated names irresistibly drawn there, from writers like Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes, to actors such as John Hurt and Daniel Day-Lewis, and above all musicians, including Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Bono, and Michael Jackson. All of them have succumbed to the enchantment of days passed at Luggala.
O’Byrne treats the house like a three-dimensional novel, mining centuries of gossip, scandal, and tragedy, as well as family albums, guest books, letters, and diaries, to create a 256-page volume that is as satisfying as a pint of the stout that fueled the family of Luggala’s fortune. - Architectural Digest.
The book charts the epic and magical appeal of the Guinness’s fairytale house, Luggala Lodge in County Wicklow that has forever drawn the great and the good to its distinctive beauty. - Country and Town House
