John Coote is not an easy man to pin down. He travels constantly,
spending four months of
the year
researching historic buildings, and then jetting around the world
between the 20 or so design projects he has on his plate at
any one
time. “I
listen to how my clients need and
want to
live,” he says, “and
then I work on
the
building from the
inside out, from the
interior
to
the
exterior.”
Meanwhile,
his ravishing
house in Ireland
stands
patiently
waiting
for his
return.
Bellamont
House, an
hour from Dublin, is one of
the finest
examples of Palladian
architecture
in Ireland. The
estate is set in the
drumlin
landscape of rounded
hills and lakes
dotted
with wooded
islands. It was built
for Colonel
Thomas Coote, Earl of
Bellamont, by
Sir
Edward Lovett
Pearce in
1725, a year after
the architect’s
return
from a tour of Italy. Pearce
also
built
the
former Houses of
Parliament, now the Bank of Ireland, on
College
Green
in Dublin. He was
first cousin to Sir
John
Vanbrugh, the
playwright and joint
architect
of
Blenheim Palace, Winston
Churchill’s childhood
home. It is thought
that Lovett Pearce
may
have had a
hand in Blenheim’s
facade. More
certain is
his
contribution of Palladian
colonnades and
terminating
pavilions
to Castletown
House,
home of the
legendary Dukes of
Leinster.
When John Coote
returns to
Bellamont
from his
travels,
the
dormant house awakens to crowds of
guests and
large
parties. It is
the perfect venue for
entertaining,
complete with a
ballroom with
a
hardwood
floor and vast
kitchens for
catering, a fact not lost
on
Coote’s three
20-something
children.
Coote hired artisans to create the drawing room’s
ornate white table,
which is based on an 18th-century
version.
Custom chairs and a sofa have
extra-deep
seats.
Coote was born and raised on his
father’s sheep
farm in
Australia.
His
great-grandfather, from the wrong
side of
the blankets in
the Coote family, immigrated
to Australia in
1904
from a farm 10
miles from the Cootehill
estate. The first
that
John Coote
knew of Bellamont
House was
in 1962,
when he read an article
in Country
Life. In 1987, during a
weekend in
Ireland, he
discovered
that the house was
for sale,
and,
of course,
he
snapped it up. “It was
in
a terrible state,” he says. The history of
the
Earls
of Bellamont at
the house, and his
family’s links to
it, are a
delight to
him, and he
specifically loves
the fact
that Richard Coote, the
second Earl of
Bellamont, was an early
governor of New
York, where
one office of his
design
practice,
Coote Hill Design
Inc., is
now based.
Shortly after
Coote
bought
the house, interior designer David
Mlinaric and
Desmond Guinness, president of
the Irish Georgian Society,
came for supper.
“Restoring this will be a lifetime
project,”
Mlinaric
advised. “I didn’t know
what he
was talking about,”
says
Coote, “but he
was
right. The work is
never finished.”
This page: Possum, his Irish wolfhound, in repose
in the main hall. Busts of the
Earls of Bellamont
line the
walls.
First, he set about
restoring
the
1,000-acre
estate to its
original layout. He
cleared
forests,
revealing ancient oak
trees,
restored the grounds to grassland
and
removed
bedraggled Victorian flowerbeds close to
the
house.
The
park
now has a
bewitchingly
untouched
look—200 deer roam around, and
swans and
ducks splutter
on the
lakes—and light floods the
house.
It
helped that Coote
specializes in
restoring
historic
properties, as well
as
designing new classical houses.
Restoration was
the name of
the game, but,
interestingly,
every piece of
furniture in
the house
is new. Coote drew up
Irish Georgian designs based
on
archives and
had the
furnishings reproduced by
master craftsmen all
over the
world.
“The
house has
40
pieces of furniture, and they were
made in
Ireland,
England, India, Australia—wherever the craftsmen
could
be
found,” he says. The
mahogany hall
table was
based on a
drawing by
Lovett Pearce and was
made in
Ireland. Its heavy
limestone top
came
from
an old quarry in Kilkenny.
Paints
and
fabrics
were also
meticulously
researched. The dining chairs are
covered
with a cloth
Coote had specially woven, based
on a
scrap of 18th-century
linen.
It
is a
subtle homage to the
second Earl of
Bellamont, who was an
important
figure in the
emergent
Irish
linen
industry. The paintwork in all
the
rooms is
distemper, a velvety,
matte 18th-century paint based
on lime
and water; and
the
shade used in several
rooms is a
persimmon
pink that
was much in favor at
the
time. “I
had everything
made bespoke—rugs,
textiles,
everything. It’s
the way
I’m used
to
working,” Coote says.
Hand-woven Irish linen, copied from a
scrap of
fabric Coote found in an old
building, covers
contemporary chairs
in the dining room.
Occasionally, Coote likes to introduce
an
out-of-period
note, like
the contemporary
painting by
Robert Doyle that hangs in
his drawing
room. Amazingly, it
doesn’t seem out of place
alongside Coote family
busts in the
hall and
The Death of Dido
by Geurcino
in the
ballroom (an
18th-century copy of the
original
in the
Palazzo Spada in
Rome).
Despite the
notoriety of icy drafts in Britain’s country
houses,
Coote
insists that
Bellamont is not
difficult to heat. “It’s
energy
efficient,” he says.
“All the
fireplaces are
at the core of the
house, and
there is
masses of wood on the
estate.”
Despite his
peripatetic life, Coote
is also
building a house on
a
farm in
Tipperary,
where he discovered remains of an
old
estate. It will
be,
naturally, based on a
classical design. He
is aware
that some people
detest
newly built classical houses,
which could easily fall
into
pastiche. “But if you
do
it
right,
using the
proper materials, which
age beautifully,
people can’t
tell when it was built,” he says. Give
him a
couple
of years,
and you will swear
the Tipperary house has
been
there forever.
“My houses don’t date,” he says.
“I
try to design
them
around
the art of
conservation—and
conversation. I think
interiors
should be
welcoming.”
Coote Hill Design Inc., 212.989.1600,
+353.49.555.6438