For Sale: The $14 Million Irish Manor House Paid for by Lady In Red

(Bloomberg) -- Chris de Burgh’s hit song The Lady in Red (1986) had been on the airwaves for nearly a decade when he began to contemplate moving into a bigger house. His family had lived in Dalkey, a seaside suburb of Dublin, and when they decided to move, de Burgh began to scour the surrounding area looking for suitable properties.

He soon came across a Georgian mansion called Bushey Park, set about 13 miles from the center of Dublin. Its owners had lived there for more than 30 years and, he says, “had lived in some style but had also reached the point where they wanted to sell. They said they would sell it to me and notify me when they were ready [to do so].” 

A short time later, while de Burgh was on tour, he discovered that the family had neglected the promise and put the home up for sale without notifying him. 

Through a lawyer, de Burgh managed to buy the place, anyway. “And then my wife and I spent seven years restoring it,” he says. “We were involved in every aspect of it.”

Thirty years later, de Burgh is now parting with the 23,158-square-foot, eight-bedroom home, listing it with Ireland Sotheby’s International Realty for €12.5 million ($14 million).

“There’s no financial need,” he says. “I don’t have to sell this place. I just think it’s too big for two people.”

Rack and Ruin

De Burgh had spent much of his childhood in a 12th century Irish castle his parents ran as a hotel. “My grandfather bought this place with a 170-acre farm,” de Burgh says. “So I was really brought up as a farming boy and a hotelier, which I suppose is unusual.” (The castle is still in the family—during this interview, De Burgh was speaking on the phone from the castle’s banquet hall, where he could see his family’s heraldic crest mounted on the wall.)

Because of his familiarity with very large, very old houses, de Burgh keenly understood that “a lot of these homes were going to rack and ruin because they’re expensive to upkeep and can’t be heated,” he says. “I used to go to a lot of these houses and see their old owners hunched around fires trying to keep warm.”

As a result, when he bought Bushey Park, he resolved to retrofit his new eight-bedroom house in such a way that he’d never have to shiver in his own living room.

When the previous couple moved out, they’d “taken everything they possibly could—the door handles, light bulbs, it was left almost derelict,” he says. So he was free to start effectively from scratch. The de Burghs removed all the ceilings and floors and installed insulation in the outer walls. 

As he replaced the floors, he added radiant heat, along with noise insulation underneath the boards. “I remember being in cheap English hotels where you could hear every creak from the fellow upstairs,” de Burgh explains. “So we put in a sound barrier between the first floor and the ground floor.”

Additional Improvements

Other improvements included an elevator and a panic room with two-inch thick steel doors and a communications hookup.  They also commissioned furniture for the house, de Burgh says. “A lot of it was built bespoke for the premises.”

It would, he continues, “be great if someone walks in and says ‘Yep, I love everything in here, I’ll take it all.” (The furniture is not included in the list price.)

The house has a main reception hall, a morning room, dining room, study, and family room, along with an eat-in kitchen and a wine cellar that can accommodate 600 bottles. There are eight en-suite bedrooms and a 12,000-square-foot “leisure complex” with a screening room, a game room with ping pong tables, and an indoor pool.

Lovely as the main house might be, the indoor pool is clearly de Burgh’s passion.

“As a touring musician, I always had a passion for swimming, and I filmed a lot of swimming pools that I liked the look of,” he says.

Many of the features he most prized in others’ pools are incorporated into his own. “For example, if you’re in a pool, and it doesn’t have what’s called a level deck where the water spills over the edges, it creates a lot of turbulence in the water.” 

He installed lights in the ceiling with colors that can be modified, and he commissioned an astronomer to recreate the star cluster that he and his family saw on December 31, 1999, on a trip to Mauritius. “Someday, someone might look up at it and say ‘Oh, that looks like the Southern Cross,” he says.

He avoided any decoration inside the pool itself. “Some people’s pools have a big design on the bottom, but if a child is drowning you won’t be able to see it,” he says. 

The Grounds

He took a similarly rigorous approach to the rest of the property, which spans about 27 acres. He leveled an area so he could play soccer with his kids, installed a tennis court, and built a walled garden with fruits and vegetables.

He also repaved the courtyard around the house with stones he found in Bayreuth, Germany. “I was staying in a hotel quite close to the railway station, and saw acres of cobblestone from my window, in the rail yard,” he says. “I contacted Deutsche Bank through a friend of mine who lives in Heidelberg and bought 350 tons of them, which they pulled out of the ground and transported across Europe in 15 trucks.”

The property has a 1,500-square-foot guest cottage, and even though he doesn’t ride horses, de Burgh refurbished the property’s stables “because I thought someone might want to use them someday,” he says. “All of this is for the future.”

Despite the large house and extensive grounds, de Burgh says that they have no live-in staff. Instead, they have someone who he refers to as the “estate manager” who keeps things running, and a German gardener “who has an occasional assistant, but that’s about it,” he says. The house, he continues, is fairly self-sustainable.

In total, de Burgh says he’s “probably put more money into it than I’m asking back,” but his children have all moved out; his daughter Rosanna was crowned Miss World in 2003. “It just became too big.”

“Maybe,” de Burgh muses, “as a hard-headed businessman, I should have been a bit more careful. But I wasn’t, and we’ve created something spectacular.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.