'A toy cut from cardboard': Glin Castle's renaissance at the hands of an elite garden designer and her A-list husband

Glin Castle stands upright and alert on the banks of the Shannon, one of the few historic country houses in Co Limerick that is still in the ownership of the family that built it. Desmond Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society, wrote of the house: ‘There is something rather unreal about Glin; it looks like a toy cut from cardboard, and the illusion is only heightened by the little battlemented lodges, resembling castles in a game of chess, that protect the demesne.’

It may have the air of a toy castle, but, as we discovered in the last article, it has a deep and remarkable history. The current chatelaine’s father, Desmond FitzGerald, who died in 2011, was the 29th holder of the ancient Irish hereditary title of Knight of Glin. Now, his eldest daughter, the garden designer and horticulturist Catherine FitzGerald, has taken on the mantle of protector of Glin Castle with her husband, the actor Dominic West.

The presentation of the interiors of Glin closely reflects that devised by the 29th Knight of Glin when he returned to live in Ireland in 1975. He was a scholar and sophisticate, who worked for many years as a curator in the furniture department of the V&A Museum and became both Christie’s representative for Ireland and a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland. The preservation of the house dominated his later life. In this endeavour, he was supported by his wife, Olda, Madam FitzGerald, a gardener and author, who saw through the much-admired restoration of the long-abandoned walled garden.

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He also became a tireless campaigner for Irish cultural heritage and that of the 18th century in particular. His contribution to scholarship gained impetus from the fact that he belonged to a seemingly vanishing tribe of Anglo-Irish landowners. A president of the Irish Georgian Society, and on the first board of the Irish Architectural Archive, FitzGerald was author of numerous books, including The Painters of Ireland c. 1600-1920 (1978) and Irish Furniture (2007), the latter with James Peill, with whom he later also collaborated on The Irish Country House (2010). He was a collector of Irish paintings, furniture and decorative arts — silver and ceramics were a great love — and the role of Glin Castle in shaping his tastes and instincts cannot be overestimated.

Robert O’Byrne’s biography, The Last Knight: A tribute to Desmond FitzGerald 29th Knight of Glin (2013), covers his life and career fully, but some account of his circumstances should be given here. Born in 1937, the years of his early life at Glin were difficult ones for many country-house owners in Ireland. He was 12 when his father died and his formidable mother, Veronica, threw herself into preserving her son’s inheritance, supported by her second husband, Canadian businessman Ray Milner.

Madam FitzGerald also installed several historic chimneypieces from lost historic Co Limerick houses, with two from Tervoe House (demolished in the 1950s) now installed in the dining and smoking rooms, and one from Ballywilliam in the library. The drawing-room chimneypiece was made by Pietro Bossi.

The Knight’s remote early childhood led him to read widely and school days at Stowe in Buckinghamshire — not entirely happy — reinforced his love of 18th-century architecture. He studied fine arts at the University of British Columbia in Canada and spent a year at the University of Malaya.

Given a place at Harvard in the US, he worked on a thesis about the Irish Palladians, which became the basis for numerous articles, but was never completed. He married Olda Willes in 1970 and they moved back to Ireland in 1975. There followed 40 years of legendary hospitality and collaborative work, keeping Glin Castle. The FitzGeralds’ children are garden designer Catherine, now chatelaine of Glin; Nesta, a well-known artist and illustrator based in Dublin, and Honor, recently returned from California to Ireland, where her husband runs an art gallery.

After his return, and for the next four decades, the Knight of Glin was at the centre of debates around Ireland’s 18th-century culture. Among his notable friends and collaborators, the Knight was close to pioneering conservationists Desmond and Mariga Guinness of Leixlip Castle; as well as to academics Anne Crookshank and Edward McParland of Trinity College Dublin; and to Maurice Craig, who worked for An Taisce, the Irish heritage body. His London circle included Peter Thornton, John and Eileen Harris, Christopher Gibbs, Mark Girouard and John Cornforth, the latter two writing memorable Country Life articles about Glin Castle (respectively, February 27 and March 5, 1964, and June 11, 1998). William Laffan also points to the numerous younger scholars whom he encouraged with hospitality and shared research.

FitzGerald was a regular contributor to Apollo and Country Life magazines and was behind the influential book Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland (1988) and accompanying exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 1990, he succeeded Guinness as the chairman of the Irish Georgian Society, helping it settle into new Merrion Square offices in Dublin — first in No 42, then at No 74 — and spearheaded fundraising for the move to the City Assembly House. He also helped establish an influential new journal, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies.

Much of what is described above was the pro-bono side of his career, carried out on behalf of others. His principal work from the early 1970s was as Christie’s representative in Ireland. The role, he admitted, sometimes made him feel like a funeral director at great house sales. He also played an undeniable role in garnering interest from a new breed of Irish collectors; he further encouraged these collectors to bring important Irish 18th-century works back to historic Irish houses.

A considerable collector in his own right, there is an account of his collecting principles in Cornforth’s Country Life article on June 11, 1998: ‘It is an unusual collector’s house because it does not feel like one: Everything looks as though it has always been there, and the recent arrivals are at ease with the ancestors… Decoration on its own can create dead houses with objects that often only play a role of pattern-making, but at Glin everything has a reason for being there.’ Despite a major sale in 2009 — Glin Castle: A Knight in Ireland — held at Christie’s in London, the house still feels much as it did in his day; Ms FitzGerald explains that her father rehung the main collection personally, so it was done with his eye and knowledge of how the rooms should look. Except for some family silver, it was products of his more recent collecting that were sold.

For instance, the entrance hall features John Wilson’s portrait of the builder of the castle, John FitzGerald, 23rd Knight of Glin, in the uniform of a colonel of the Royal Glin Artillery (Fig 6), and another of his wife, Margaretta Maria. Above a side table with the arms of the Fitzmaurice family hangs a Herman van der Mijn portrait of Richard FitzGerald, the 22nd Knight, shown in the act of receiving a challenge to a duel (Fig 4). Facing this is a full-length portrait by Michael Wright of John, 1st Lord Kingston. There are also groups of skilled portrayals of racehorses painted by Lady Rachel FitzGerald.

By the door to the staircase is a fine portrait of an earlier Nesta FitzGerald by Norwegian artist Christian Meyer Ross, painted in 1882 when she was on honeymoon in Rome. The wooden lantern by Detmar Blow was copied from a Venetian Renaissance example; one of a set made for the Gallery at Adare Manor, Co Limerick, home of the Dunraven family. The dining room’s deep-red walls feature portraits of former Knights, including John Fraunceis FitzGerald, 24th Knight of Glin, known locally as The Knight of the Women.

For a time, the FitzGeralds ran a successful small country-house hotel with manager Bob Duff, which spurred renovations of the unfinished top floor as en-suite bedrooms, but the 2008 recession led to its closure. This was a great blow and prompted the Christie’s sale referred to above. Madam FitzGerald valiantly kept things going during the ‘downturn’ that followed, but, in 2015, it seemed no longer possible to keep the castle going financially and it was put it on the market.

Fate played a hand and no buyer came forward. Ms FitzGerald and her husband, Mr West, then made the decision to take the house on, with the family remaining resident in the wing (Fig 7). This was formerly a range of service spaces and workshops, which was remodelled in part first for FitzGerald’s mother and then further converted by the Knight for the family’s occupation; it now includes a family kitchen (Fig 5) and, on the first floor, a handsome library/drawing room overlooking the gardens. The main house is run as an exclusive private-hire business, specialising in group stays, corporate retreats and events, with a long season seeing a constant flow of visitors — all expertly managed by Marie-Therese Costelloe. The outlook for Glin is secure for the first time in many years and there are projects to create further public walks through the demesne woodlands and restore the historic lodges.

The credit for all this goes to the current incumbents. Ms FitzGerald’s devotion to Glin Castle derives partly from growing up there and working on the garden in different periods of her life, but it has also shaped her work as a designer.

To the gardens established by her parents, she has added a new wildflower meadow and a broader range of planting, including a collection of magnolias, other flowering trees and acid-loving shrubs. Professionally, she trained at RHS Wisley in Surrey and worked for Arabella Lennox-Boyd, before her first independent project, for the Glenarm Castle walled garden, Co Antrim, which won the Historic Houses Garden of the year award in 2023.

Now, she works closely with Mark Lutyens, a landscape architect, as Lutyens and FitzGerald, such as on the five-year revival of the gardens of Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland, for Historic Royal Palaces, which included a reimagined walled garden, terraces and parterres around the house. She also co-founded the successful Festival of Gardens and Nature held annually at Ballintubbert, Co Laois.

The deep sense of place that Ms FitzGerald brings to her work has steered her care for the house. The colour schemes of Glin Castle have largely been preserved as her parents envisioned them, including the dark blue in the library, hand painted by their friend Mariga Guinness one summer in the 1960s (Fig 3). One major project has been the complete renovation of the drawing room — the window over-lintels had to be replaced and the walls stripped back and re-plastered. All this work was done by expert local craftsman Leo Healy, whose family worked on the house during the 19th and 20th centuries. The walls were painted a soft pink on the advice of David Mlinaric, an old family friend, and the plaster frieze and other mouldings, which were darkened with soot, were cleaned — lifting the spirit of the room. Pictures were rehung and old curtains removed entirely to allow more light in and reveal the beautiful Georgian bow windows, which look out to the Shannon estuary (Fig 1). A new carpet was introduced, together with comfortable upholstered furniture and modern textiles in the principal reception rooms (Fig 2).

The feel is that of a hospitable Irish country house, with the strong, artistic stamp of the FitzGerald family who gave it shape and maintain it still, to be enjoyed for the future both as a house and as a representative of the inherited property of an ancient Irish line.

Find out more at the Glin Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the April 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.