On the day John Aboud took possession of No 11 North Great George’s Street, Dublin, he was handed a set of keys by the last tenant, Margaret Howard. Some of the keys he held in his hands had been turning locks in the house since it was built in the late 18th century.
Charles Orpen might have used them in the 1830s, when he returned home after a day’s work helping to invent sign language and opening Ireland’s first school for the deaf. George Whitford might have jangled them, too, in the 1820s, some time between becoming high sheriff of Dublin and being knighted by George IV at the Mansion House.
Another occupant, Michael Davitt, the IRB leader, probably never had a key, since the owner of No 11, sympathetic to the republican cause, let him hide there when he was on the run before being imprisoned in 1870.
Next Sunday, Aboud will open the doors of No 11 to the masses as part of the Open House Dublin festival, set up to give the Irish public a close look at Dublin’s finest buildings.
“It’s miraculous — those keys were handed down from tenant to tenant over the centuries — and they survived,” says Aboud.
Even more remarkable, he says, is the way in which the house survived more than two centuries, during which its Dublin 1 address degenerated from Dublin’s most exclusive to north inner-city dereliction, including more than two decades of abandonment and decay before Aboud came on the scene.
As Irish houses go, he says, No 11 is a shining example of just how robust the Georgians made them. Even in late 1980s derelict Dublin, No 11 stood out. On a block of similarly neglected properties on North Great George’s Street, it looked one of the worst.
“It was virtually roofless, a huge number of windows were broken, it was saturated and the upper floors had been inhabited by pigeons, rather than people, for about 20 years,” says Aboud. Yet a wealth of miraculously preserved features were hidden behind the layers of grime.
“It appeared far more horrific than it was. The house was relatively intact and all the original features were still here, right down to details such as those working locks and keys.”
Also fully intact were the original rococo ceilings, thought to be some of the last work of the Robert West school of rococo plasterwork, as well as the cornicing, flooring, neoclassical fireplaces and joinery, shutters and architraves. The classical palladian-style property, deliberately or otherwise, had been built as though to save itself.
“So much material went into the building of these houses compared with nowadays,” says Aboud.
“You had 1½in-thick plaster on ceilings. The sheer volume of materials absorbed a huge amount of damage. This is why so many of these houses have managed to survive and why it’s possible to pull them back from the brink.”
Restoration began with the replacement of the roof and of damaged flooring directly beneath it. Then came the stripping back of the walls and floors, which exposed up to 10 layers of wallpaper dating from the 1890s to the 1970s. A similar number of layers of linoleum were torn from the floors, dating from 1920 to the 1960s.
Aboud, an archeologist, and his team kept records and samples of their finds, even though back then no official body was in situ to look over their shoulders.
“At that time, there were no rules. The only part that was listed was on the facade — the door stairway, for practical purposes. In those days, there was no such thing as listing an entire property. We could have gone in and practically demolished the whole lot.” Instead, Aboud and a small team erected the scaffolding and began the rescue operation that he says still isn’t finished.
“There are huge time-scales involved in a refurbishment like this,” he says. “When it came to the salon, it took three of us four months to strip the old paint away. Then it took another month to repaint.”
Aboud had renovated a property before and took a natural interest in refurbishment. But whereas most Georgian renovations today are carried out with almost obsessive reverence to the original layout, sometimes involving months of research and many experts, Aboud had no grand plans to replicate No 11 exactly as it once stood.
“Expertise in refurbishment wasn’t generally available at the time, and whenever it was, it was expensive. So we did it ourselves.”
Aboud was enthusiastic about inner-city living, and was keen to make No 11 into a home fit for modern life. The house today is not used in the way it would have been when it was built. What was the main bedroom is now a dining room, while the other main reception rooms are rented out for events and parties, with the main living quarters on the top floor.
“It would be impractical to live in the whole house as they did in Georgian times. It’d be impractical today to sit in a vast salon, just watching television,” he says. “We never intended to re- create historically accurate rooms. It’s easy for larger rooms, but much more difficult in a smaller room you plan to spend a lot of time in,” he says.
In Aboud’s own living quarters, contemporary furniture is set against the formal backdrop and solid proportions of the Georgian fabric.
Thanks to the presence of a tenant right up until the house was sold in 1987, all of No 11’s fireplaces were in situ. In most abandoned grand homes, fireplaces were pillaged by thieves and sold on the black market.
“The joinery and fireplace in the salon would have been changed in the 1820s or 1830s. The fireplace that was found in the drawing room was a neoclassical piece, so we decided it would be better suited to the front room.” A black marble fireplace, more in keeping with the original style of the house, was sourced and fitted in the drawing room, the only room Aboud and his team re-created authentically.
The look of the rooms that modern-day visitors can now admire, although strikingly in the period style, are not strict historical reconstructions. Aboud has given Dublin an uncharacteristically colourful example of a Georgian home. The rococo ceiling in the salon, for example, has been treated to a palette of bright colours that were not — and still are not — common in Irish Georgian houses.
“Never before would you have had a polychromatic, multicoloured rococo ceiling in an Irish house. The pattern is quite traditional, but that ice-cream- parlour colour scheme would only be found in these sorts of houses on the Continent,” he says.
The period furniture was sourced gradually over the years, the majority of it from around Ireland. A chandelier was bought in Amsterdam and a few pieces came from shops around Portobello market in London.
“Many pieces were actually bought in pieces, and were the subject of some restoration work themselves,” Aboud says.
The house also contains a variety of his personal collections, including a cabinet of dolls, an array of oriental ornaments and some reclaimed plasterwork, salvaged from skips outside demolished houses. A poignant reminder of the fate of so many of No 11’s contemporaries, the plasterwork now has pride of place on a wall of the house, where it can be seen on Sunday.
Open House Dublin runs from Friday October 20 to Sunday October 22. No 11 can be toured on Sunday at 2.30pm. Booking is essential. Call 01 663 3055 or e-mail info@architecturefoundation.ie
