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Number 8 Merrion Square. The Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland
www.riai.ie
Number 8 Merrion Square
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Number 8 Merrion Square, lies on the north side of the square and was built between 1763 and 1765 by Robert Price. Since 1924 it has been the home of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland. It is the earliest of the properties on view in the Merrion Square Open Day.
According to Sean O'Reilly the original plot for the house was "of 9280 square feet had a 32 foot frontage to the square and to the rear, and 290 feet for borders to the flanking plots...Number 8 had a relatively varied residency throughout the nineteenth century. |
Its residents included the Jones family up to 1830, Colonel St. John Black who acquired the lease in 1831, while in 1863 Sir Phillip Crampton Smyly worked from here, later Sir Phillip, he was to become one of Ireland's most important medical figures and was surgeon to four Viceroys and Queen Victoria.
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Entertainment was almost a duty for the fashionable resident in the square. Its requirements caused the second major alternation to the house, the insertion about 1820 of communicating folding doors between the front and rear first floor rooms. The idea was very common in the nineteenth century as the combined rooms allowed sufficient space for the formal social entertianments of the period. Late Georgian houses often had such communicating doors as original features but in earlier houses, this feature had to be inserted. The ground floor contains some of the more distinctive original features. The dado panelling is most noteworthy, and the original casings in the front room are also good. The entrance hall has remained almost intact, with its fine diamond flagging and the original surround- echoing the door surround- to the distinctive but not uncommon angle fire-place".
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Number 45 Merrion Square The Irish Architectural Archive
www.iarc.ie
Standing four stories over basement, and five bays wide, Number 45 is the largest of the terraced houses on Merrion Square. The house was built circa 1794 for the property developer Gustavus Hume. The architect may have been Samuel Sproule who, in the early 1780s, was responsible for the laying out of much of Holles Street, of both Mount Streets and of the east side of Merrion Square.
The first person to live in the house seems to have been Robert la Touche who leased the building in 1795. In 1829 the house was sold to Sir Thomas Staples. It had been built in an ambitious and optimistic age, but in the Dublin of the late 1820s its huge size was somewhat anachronistic and certainly uneconomical, so Sir Thomas had the building carefully divided into two separate houses. Sir Thomas died aged 90 in 1865, the last survivor of the Irish House of Commons. On his death, both parts of the house passed to Sir John Banks, Regius Professor of Physic in Trinity College, who, like his predecessor, leased the smaller portion of the divided building, by now numbered Nos. 10 and 11 Merrion Square East. Banks himself lived in Number 11, the larger part, which he maintained in high decorative order.
Banks died in 1910, and both parts of the building fell vacant and remained so until 1915 when the whole property was used to accommodate the clerical offices of the National Health Insurance Company. With single occupancy restored, the division of the building, renumbered 44 - 45 Merrion Square, began to be reversed, a process carried on in fits and starts as successive Government departments and agencies moved in and out over the decades. The last to go was the Irish Patents Office, whose relocation to Kilkenny in 1996 left the way open for the assignment of the building to the Irish Architectural Archive.
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Number 49 Merrion Square, National University of Ireland (1908 – 2008).
www.nui.ie
Number 49 Merrion Square
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Number 49, on the east side of one of Dublin's best-known Georgian squares, has been home to the National University of Ireland since 1912. The house was built by George Kent some time between the 1790s and 1814 and was leased in 1818 by Robert Way Harty, who was later elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1831. It is Way Harty who is generally credited with having commissioned the mural paintings, which are such an important feature of the house. The elegant scheme of mural paintings in the two first-floor rooms, which also served as the original Senate Rooms of the University, has been commented described as ‘the most ambitious C19 painted interiors in Dublin”.
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The murals completely cover the walls from the dado upwards with the mural or murals on each wall being set in illusionistic wooden frames. Other studies of the mural paintings show that the sources and inspirations for these Italianate landscape scenes, which include classical and mythological references were taken from works by a number of artists including Claude Lorrain, Rubens, Salvatore Rosa and Grimaldi.
Due to the absence of documentary evidence, the identity of the artist is unknown. Nevertheless, the scale and quality of the cycle of mural paintings in 49 Merrion Square is unique in Dublin and is significant in terms of the Georgian heritage of interior decoration.
The house is noteworthy also for having a mews house finished in the gothic style. The backs of the plots on this side of Merrion Square were serviced by a laneway running from Mount Street Upper to Fitzwilliam Street Lower.
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St. Stephen's Parish Church (The Pepper Canister, Mount Street Upper)
www.peppercanister.ie
St. Stephen's Parish Church, The Pepper Canister
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The parish of St. Stephen was carved from the large medieval parish of St. Peter's. It derived its name from the medieval leper hospital of St. Stephen, which stood on the site of Mercer's Hospital. With the rapid expansion of the city Suburbs in the 18th century, it became necessary to build new churches to accommodate the expanding population.
St. Stephen's Church was the last of a distinguished series of Georgian churches built by the Church of Ireland. These new suburbs were built on the estates of families that are now commemorated in the names of the streets and squares of Dublin - names like Gardener (Mountjoy),
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Dawson, Molesworth, and Pembroke (Herbert).
It was on the land of the Pembroke estate - the medieval manor of Merrion - that St. Stephen's church was built (on ground donated by the family). The Pembroke pew is still identifiable.
The church was consecrated by Archbishop Magee on 5 December 1824 as a chapel-of-ease to St. Peter's. It was designed by John Bowden and Completed after his death by Joseph Welland. In its original form the church was rectangular: the Victorian apse, which clearly owes its inspiration to the Oxford Movement, was added in 1852 (you can still see the tell-tale line of the extension in the external masonary).
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58 Merrion Square. Daniel O'Connell House
The Keough Notre Dame Centre is situated in the house in which the famous early nineteenth century Irish Catholic political leader, Daniel O'Connell, lived most of his life. Called ‘The Liberator', he was a leader in the battle for Catholic Emancipation and instrumental in the 1829 law which allowed Irish Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold high office.
O'Connell House is a late eighteenth century building on Merrion Square, the most elegant Georgian square in central Dublin. It is a four storey red brick building with fine, light-filled rooms. Purchased by Notre Dame in 2002, it houses reception rooms, offices, classrooms, a computer room, a library, a chapel and two student apartments in the basement.
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63 Merrion Square. The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland
www.rsai.ie
63 Merrion Square
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The Society was founded in 1849 in Kilkenny as the Kilkenny Archaeological Society “to preserve, examine and illustrate all ancient monuments and memorials of the arts, manners and customs of the past, as connected with the antiquities, language, literature and history of Ireland.” The Society, through its council and country-wide membership, is actively involved in the preservation of our national heritage. Members are entitled to use the Society's library which contains books on Irish history, antiquities and archaeological and historical journals published in Ireland, Great Britain and on the continent.
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The headquarters of the Society in Number 63 Merrion Square is now over two hundred years old. The first lease of 63 Merrion Square was dated 3rd January 1787 and was between the Rt Hon. Richard Lord Viscount Fitzwilliam and Joseph Sandwith. Sandwith took out two leases - both for 150 years – to build two houses on the site. The rent was £ 9 each p.a. Since the house came into the possession of the Society in 1917 the Society has carried out a number of refurbishment and development projects. The most important recent development was the construction of the Helen Roe Theatre in 1993.
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Mews of Number 63 Merrion Square
www.irishlandmark.com
Mews of Number 63 Merrion Square
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The mews building at the rear of number 63 Merrion Square is an integral part of one of the most significant survivals of an 18th century Dublin townhouse within the classic Fitzwilliam/ Merrion Square area of Dublin. Built in 1792/93 the house retains much of its historic character and fabric. The garden is one of the few surviving gardens in Merrion square and most certainly the only remaining garden retaining a 19th century design and layout. The mews also has a private garden, coach yard, coach house and stalls, which will be in full use when further funding is secured. Whitelaw's survey of the population of Dublin in 1798
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showed that for every 3 people living in the Merrion Square area there were two servants employed. Servant's quarters for those looking after the coach and horses were part of the mews building. Although the terms of the Fitzwilliam Estate leases were strict and prohibted a wide array of commerical activities, trade directories show that by the mid 1840s, the stable lanes of Merrion Square were home to a variety of trades with occupations such as bottle dealer, dairy-keeper, and horse shoer appearing in Fitzwilliam Lane in 1848.
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Mercy International Centre Baggot Street Lower
www.mercyinternational.ie
Mercy International Centre
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Catherine McAuley (1778 – 1841), born at Stormanstown House, Co. Dublin to James and Elinor McAuley opened the House of Mercy on Baggot St here on the 24th of September, 1827 as a place where she and a number of companions could undertake charitable works. In choosing to locate in the heart of fashionable Dublin, Catherine's aim was to alert the wealthy to the plight of those less well off.
Poverty existed inside the confines of the new Georgian quarters of Dublin. 'The residents of Merrion Square may be surprised to hear,' wrote Dr. Whitely Stokes in 1799, that in the angle behind Mount Street and Holles Street there is now a family of ten in a very small room, of whom eight have had fever in the last month'. The House of Mercy was
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soon to become home to a school, hostel, orphanage,
sheltered workshop, employment agency, Adult Education centre, as well as a base for various social services.
On the 12th of December, 1831, the house was designated as the first Convent of Mercy with Catherine McAuley as Mother Superior.
In 1994 the Convent was refurbished and it was rededicated as Mercy International Centre. It is now a place of Hospitality, Heritage, Renewal and Pilgrimage for the Mercy World.
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Number 29 Fitzwilliam Street Lower
www.esb.ie/no29
Number 29 Nine Fitzwilliam Street was one of ten houses on Fitzwilliam Street Lower and on Mount Street Upper restored by the Electricity Supply Board in 1988.
Number 29 Nine Fitzwilliam Street
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The house was first occupied, by the widow of a prominent Dublin wine merchant, Olivia Beatty, in November 1794. Since its last occupation for domestic use, in or around 1916, the house had been vacant up until its purchase by the newly formed Electricity Supply Board in 1928. It was then used as offices for the organisation until the late 1980s. The decision to use one of the ten houses as a Georgian House museum, grew from the fact that in 1988 as part of the Millenium celebrations in Dublin city, the National Museum had staged an exhibition of Georgian furniture, ceramics, glass, and costumes, in Number 39 Merrion Square, an Electricity Supply Board property.
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Before the opening of the Collins Barracks site the National Museum of Ireland had little space in which to display its fine collection of Irish decorative arts and furniture. The success of the Millenium exhibition spurred further co-operation, and the idea for Number Twenty Nine was born as a showcase for such material, inspired in part by Georgian house museums in Edinburgh and Bath.
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Saint Andrew's Parish Church
www.saintandrewsparish.ie
Saint Andrew's Parish Church
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St. Andrew's Parish Church on Westland Row, is one of a large number of Catholic Churches built in Dublin in the years following Catholic Emancipation. Like many of its contemporary buildings, such as St. Paul's on Aran Quay or the Pro Cathedral on Marlborough Street, it is built in a classical revival style, in this instance that of the Greek revival. It has often been said that these buildings express a new found confidence of behalf of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
The present structure which fronts onto Westland Row is a fully integrated part of the streetscape. |
It was designed by James Bolger, and its prominent location was encouraged by Daniel O'Connell, a parishioner and resident of Merrion Square. Work on the church started in 1832 and finished in 1843. At the apex of the pediment on the church façade stands a statue of Saint Andrew, crucified on an x shaped cross. This colossal statue was designed by the sculptor John Smyth, son of Edward Smyth who was responsible for many of the stone sculptures on James Gandon's Customs House, a generation earlier.
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