The Deeps, Crossabeg, Co Wexford
Mark Bence-Jones. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.
p. 100. “(Redmond/IFR) A single-storey house of ca 1800, with a colonnaded verandah along most of its front, which gives it an air of a bungalow in India. The colonnade is not quite central, having one bay on one side of it and one bay and a somewhat narrower bay on the other, The bays on either side of the colonnade are adorned with pilasters, which, like the columns, support an entabalture with a modillion cornice. Somewhat incongruously, the windows on either side of the colonnade have Gothich tracery, though this adds to the exotic flavour of the house. The home of John Redmond, MP, great-uncle of the more famous John Redmond who led the Irish Party.”
Price: €850,000
What: currently owned by artist Peter Pearson and his wife, Phil Stewart, this imposing colonial-style Regency villa on the banks of the River Slaney spans 468 square metres.
It features three reception rooms, five bedrooms, (two en suite), a wine cellar, pantry, storage rooms, a study, a two-storey coach house, stables, a walled garden, barn and sheds, all set on 42 acres.
Period details include decorative plasterwork, marble fireplaces, timber parquet floors, sash windows, French doors, terraces and verandas and stained glass windows.
Agent: Savills Country Homes
Detached three-bay (eight-bay deep) single-storey over basement country house, built 1836, on a rectangular plan; five-bay full-height rear (south) elevation. Sold, 1865. “Improved”, 1880, producing present composition. Occupied, 1901; 1911. Sold, 1947. Resold, 1979. Resold, 1981, to accommodate alternative use. Resold, 2001. Undergoing restoration, 2007. Hipped slate roofs on a quadrangular plan with roll moulded terracotta ridge tiles, cement rendered chimney stacks having concrete capping supporting terracotta pots, and replacement uPVC rainwater goods on rendered eaves retaining cast-iron octagonal or ogee-hoppers and downpipes. Rendered walls on rendered “bas-relief” plinth with rendered pilasters to corners supporting “Cyma Recta”- or “Cyma Reversa”-detailed cornice on blind frieze below parapet having rendered coping. Round-headed window openings centred on square-headed door opening (north) with cut-granite step threshold, rendered doorcase with monolithic pilasters supporting “Cyma Recta”- or “Cyma Reversa”-detailed cornice on “Acanthus”-detailed fluted consoles, and concealed dressings framing margined fixed-pane fittings centred on timber panelled door. Square-headed flanking window openings with cut-granite sills, and concealed dressings framing two-over-two timber sash windows. Square-headed window openings to rear (south) elevation with cut-granite sills, and concealed dressings framing six-over-six (west) or nine-over-six (east) timber sash windows. Interior including (ground floor): hall (north) retaining “basket weave” timber parquet floor, carved timber surrounds to door openings framing timber panelled doors, and groin vaulted ceiling; square-headed door opening into corridor with carved timber surround framing timber panelled door; top-lit corridor retaining “basket weave” timber parquet floor, carved timber surrounds to door openings framing timber panelled doors, and pilasters supporting groin vaulted ceilings centred on “oeil-de-boeuf” lanterns; study (north-west) retaining carved timber surround to door opening framing timber panelled door with carved timber surrounds to window openings framing timber panelled shutters, and plasterwork cornice to ceiling; reception room (west) retaining carved timber surround to door opening framing timber panelled door with carved timber surrounds to opposing window openings framing timber panelled shutters, reclaimed inlaid cut-white marble Classical-style chimneypiece, and moulded plasterwork cornice to ceiling centred on plasterwork ceiling rose; reception room (south-west) retaining carved timber Classical-style surrounds to door openings framing timber panelled doors centred on reclaimed inlaid cut-white marble Classical-style chimneypiece with carved timber surrounds to opposing window openings framing timber panelled shutters, and picture railing below egg-and-dart-detailed decorative plasterwork cornice to ceiling; bow-ended reception room (south) retaining carved timber surround to door opening framing timber panelled door with carved timber surrounds to opposing window openings, and moulded plasterwork cornice to ceiling; and carved timber surrounds to door openings to remainder framing timber panelled doors with carved timber surrounds to window openings framing timber panelled shutters on panelled risers. Set in landscaped grounds.
Appraisal
A country house erected for John Edward Redmond MP (1806-65; Lewis 1837 II, 624) representing an important component of the domestic built heritage of County Wexford with the architectural value of the composition, one most likely repurposing an eighteenth-century house annotated as “Newtown [of] Redmond Esquire” by Taylor and Skinner (1778, pl. 149), confirmed by such attributes as the deliberate alignment maximising on scenic vistas overlooking gently sloping grounds and the meandering River Slaney; the compact plan form; the definition of the principal “apartments” or reception rooms by a Colonial-esque “loggia”; and the parapeted roofline: meanwhile, aspects of the composition clearly illustrate the continued development or “improvement” of the country house in the later nineteenth century. Having been well maintained, the elementary form and massing survive intact together with substantial quantities of the original fabric, both to the exterior and to the interior where contemporary joinery; reclaimed Classical-style chimneypieces; and decorative plasterwork enrichments, all highlight the artistic potential of the composition. Furthermore, adjacent outbuildings (extant 1840); a walled garden (see 15703743); an ivy-enveloped “rustic lodge” (see 15703744); and a nearby gate lodge (see 15703745), all continue to contribute positively to the group and setting values of an estate having historic connections with the Walker family of nearby Tykillen House including Colonel Charles Stephen Walker (1841-1916), ‘Magistrate [and] Retired Colonel of 3rd “King’s Own” Hussars’ (NA 1911; cf. 15703749); and the Lockington family including Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Esmé Lockington RNR (1889-1962) and Major Derrick Bruce Esmé Garry Lockington MBE (—-).
Irish Independent article by Fran Power, Mon 30th April 2018.
When you’ve spent your life collecting, documenting and painting Dublin’s architectural history, the prospect of downsizing might be a little daunting. What do you do with the door knobs, finger plates, house numbers or fire grates that you have salvaged? How do you throw out that shard of Nelson’s pillar found on O’Connell Street after the IRA bomb in 1966, or the samples of fine plasterwork saved from the demolition of Frescati House in the 1980s?
But artist Peter Pearson, vendor of a lovely Regency house filled to the brim with fragments of Dublin’s architectural past, is upbeat. He has plans for his collection. What is needed, he says, is a museum.
“Long-term I’d like to see my collection displayed,” he says. “They are not just pretty objects. They’re all documented, where they came from and, in that sense, they’re interesting. And it is really a lot of Dublin material, so I’m hopeful that – not just my stuff but other people’s, too – that it should all be incorporated in a proper museum about the building of Dublin.”
He has his eye on a potential site and is in talks with a few interested groups, but he adds that nothing has been finalised yet and these things take time.
For the moment though, his collections fill the house he shares with his wife, Phil, a textile artist currently working with the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. How many collections does he have? “I don’t know. I’m embarrassed to say.”
The Deeps is surrounded by trees and lawn and lies about 18km south of Enniscorthy in Co Wexford. It comes to market with 42 acres of woodland and pasture and has extensive river frontage along the Slaney. It’s a house, says Peter, that is like “something you discover”, discreetly tucked into the landscape of hills and trees. And naturally, it is an architecturally interesting building.
Viewed from the west side, The Deeps is a single storey villa with a colonnade of pillars punctuated with tall Georgian windows. There are plantation shutters that still work and Peter thinks it might have been originally intended as a summer house. It has a vaguely colonial air.
“It looks uncannily like the Dun Laoghaire yacht clubs,” says Peter, whose book on the history of Dun Laoghaire, Between the Mountains and the Sea, was a bestseller.
On the entrance floor, the hallway has sprung vaulting that finishes with three oval top lights. The walls are decorated with plasterwork salvaged from the demolition of some of Dublin’s fine Georgian buildings in the 1970s and 1980s.
“At the time I was very active in trying to stop them knocking them down. And very often we weren’t successful so I’d then go along and talk to the builders at the demolition and they’d usually say take what you want.”
The floors throughout most of the entrance are parquet – sadly, the original floors were replaced sometime in the 1960s. The roof and all the major works, including replacing most of the modern windows with original sashes, rewiring and plumbing, were done when Peter and Phil brought the property back in 2001.
All the reception rooms and bedrooms lead off this corridor and most retain their original features. The music room is a beautiful book-filled space with a row of floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the west-facing terrace. It has an elegant marble mantelpiece that predates the house. The double-aspect drawing room adjoining it has a similarly distinguished chimney piece, as well as unusual doors with relief classical figures that are original to the house.
Another more informal sitting room is where the couple tend to spend evenings with their two dogs, books and TV. It has a large west-facing bay that opens onto a spacious balcony with views over the grounds.
Off the hallway to the left are two large bedrooms, linked by a joint dressing room or perhaps a baby’s room. One is the guest room, with dusky pink walls inspired, Peter says, “by the clematis that comes out in May”. There’s a beautiful Victorian cast-iron fireplace that came out of a house in Bolton Street.
The master bedroom has a curved sash window with shutters and a curved radiator to match. Each bedroom has a generous en suite with marble mosaic floors and one still has a wonderful 1960s cast-iron bathroom suite in green.
A hot press, a gallery room, two further bedrooms and another bathroom complete this floor.
The land to the rear of the house falls away steeply enough to accommodate a lower storey that houses the working rooms – a warren that includes a scullery, pantry, office (the former plate room to house the silver) and wine cellar.
The kitchen is a warm and cosy room, with a Waterford Stanley and tiled floor installed by Peter. Off it is a delightful panelled dining room with a central French chandelier, a wood-burning stove and Gothic windows rescued from a bonfire in Dundrum. “It’s nice to use these pieces of history,” says Peter.
Outside there is a pretty stable yard. A central staircase divides one building and leads up to a walled garden with rare curved corners. The original hothouse walls still stand here, and Peter and Phil have cleared the beds and planted box hedging, fruit trees and vegetables. A wrought iron gate on one side leads to an ancient yew walk.
There is a haybarn and henhouses – the hens cluck around the walled garden – and all sorts of store rooms. The stables have been partially converted and now house huge studios for Peter’s painting and Phil’s textile work. A second building has been converted into a living space with bathroom, kitchen and bedroom. Work remains to be completed on these buildings to bring them up to scratch, but much of the heavy lifting has been done.
The Deeps is a magical spot. The house could easily accommodate a family, but could also be run as a small-scale eco-tourism venture – the land has been organic for many years – or as rental or guest accommodation.
A prospective buyer needs to keep in mind that the house is a protected structure and so any renovations would need to be respectfully carried out.
However, it also qualifies for Section 482, which means that repair, maintenance or restoration costs can be written off against the owner’s tax liability as long as the property is open to the public for 60 days a year.
The M11 extension to Oilgate, the nearby village, is due to be completed by the end of the year and will bypass the bottle-neck at Enniscorthy, reducing the drive-time to Dublin to an hour and 15 minutes or so.
As for the custodians of The Deeps, they are planning to move back to Dublin where their two grown-up sons now live, one an artist, the other working in Adam’s auction house, proving that the apples haven’t fallen too far from the tree.
Meanwhile Peter is culling his collections: “I think you need to deal with these things in your lifetime. It’s not really fair to leave it,” he says. “And, it’s better to deal with it in your own time and make sure that things are the way you want them.”
https://screenwexford.com/location/period-houses/the-deeps/
The Deeps is a 19th century period house in south County Wexford, Ireland.
The house may be an ideal filming location for scenes that need a rural period house or for ones that need unorthodox country house. The main house is compact, one storey tall, and has a unique colonnaded entrance way. Unlike larger period houses that dominate the landscape, the location fits in naturally with its rural setting. The farm buildings to the rear of the main house, and the extensive grounds further add to the rustic feel of the location.
The main house was built around 1840. It may have been originally built as a summer lodge, which may explain its small size and unusual facade. Behind the main house there is a main courtyard surrounded by farm buildings. The property also has many acres of forest and farmland. As well as the garden immediately behind the main house, there is also a late 18th century walled garden on the property. In the gardens, there are ponds, walkways, sculptures, and a ruined wall that once belonged to a hothouse. The forest is on the banks of the River Slaney and the property has good views of the river.
Article in Irish Times Thurs May 25th 2006: “Reviving the Deeps, from Shallow Pockets.”
The Deeps in Co Wexford, a Regency villa, needed help. Peter and Phil Pearson had slender means but enthusiasm, expertise and a good collection of architectural salvage, when they bought it. Robert O’Byrne reports
ON A BALMY summer evening, the long low façade of The Deeps suggests it should have been built not in Ireland but in some remote region of the British colonies. Those shuttered French windows look designed to be flung open for cool drinks on the terrace, served by turbaned servants prior to guests being ushered into a dinner of curry and chat about the colonel’s wife.
But instead, The Deeps was constructed for a branch of one of the Co Wexford’s best-known local families, the Redmonds; a descendant, John Redmond, rose to national prominence at the start of the last century as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party.
By then, the Redmonds had long since left The Deeps which passed through a variety of hands – and uses – before being bought five years ago by Peter and Phil Pearson. Like so many other couples interested in taking on a major restoration project, they looked at plenty of houses before settling on this one.
“Lots of other houses,” confirms Peter, who enjoys an eminent reputation as a conservationist, author and painter. “We very nearly bought another place in Louth,” he continues, “but then someone told us about The Deeps.”
Set amid mature woodland that falls away to the banks of the River Slaney, the house lies only a few kilometres outside Wexford town but feels wonderfully secluded. By the time the Pearsons arrived, it desperately needed a complete overhaul; over the past few years The Deeps has been re-roofed, rewired and replumbed.
Large tracts of the surrounding gardens have been cleared, a couple of tatty lean-tos removed and a thriving colony of hens and geese established. In addition to these fowl, the Pearsons keep cattle, pigs and goats on their 45 acres of land, they have an orchard of apple and pear trees, grow a variety of soft fruits plus a wealth of vegetables.
Their dedication to The Deeps is impressive especially since, to paraphrase a certain political party’s one-time electoral slogan, while a lot has been done a lot still remains to do.
The wonderful walled garden, for example, with unusual curves at each of its corners, has only been semi-recovered from nature allowed to run verdant. Just beyond lies a fine yew walk that could definitely benefit from some attention, the pedimented stable block has scarcely been touched and some of the main house’s external cornicing will have to be replaced sooner rather than later.
Although the house might be called The Deeps, the Pearsons’ pockets are better described as shallow. Moreover, explains Peter, “unfortunately when we came here initially we weren’t in a position to do anything at all. It was just after 9/11 and we still hadn’t sold our house in Dublin. So we just had to move in, live with the problems and gradually work around them”. This was no easy task. To take one instance, the kitchen – darker than ought to be the case due to later extensions immediately outside its windows – was afflicted with such chronic damp that the entire floor had to be taken up and a proper dampcourse laid down.
The Pearsons have now received fnancial assistance received from both the Heritage Council and the local authority in Wexford towards restoration of The Deeps.
“Trying to deal with, and conquer, the damp is one of the biggest problems with old Irish houses,” says Peter. The problem was exacerbated in The Deeps because the lower level of the house is effectively built below ground. The couple have managed to regain control by such simple expedients as installing storage heaters and making sure all windows are regularly opened to allow plenty of air to circulate.
When it came to restoration, one advantage the Pearsons enjoyed over almost anyone else embarking on a similar project was that they could draw on Peter’s remarkable collection of architectural salvage, historic items that he has accumulated over decades for no reason other than personal interest. Walking around The Deeps, he is able to point out various instances of recycling; much of the glass in the newly-reinstated sash windows came from Dublin Castle when a home was made there for the Chester Beatty Library.
Likewise inside what was probably once the house’s morningroom, the main window’s frame and shutters look original but are, in fact, made from old pieces saved from destruction by Peter.
Downstairs next to the kitchen (now warm and snug and dry and with no hint of its former miserable state) he and Phil have created a charming panelled diningroom almost entirely from salvaged material; its pretty Gothic window looking into the hall passage came from a house in Dundrum, Co Dublin, while the Gothic cupboard door was rescued from the paper mills in Saggart.
The stylistic features of this room find a curious echo on the façade of the house. While from a distance The Deeps proposes the unadulterated appearance of a classical Regency villa, closer inspection reveals one of its quirks: on either side of the main colonnaded façade are windows with Gothic tracery.
Furthermore, while there is only a single bay on the side closest to the principal door, there are two at the other end of the front. Idiosyncrasies of this kind indicate that The Deeps was extended and altered on several occasions. The earliest evidence for the Redmond family’s association with the place is 1777 and at least part of the present structure probably dates from around that time.
The house was then greatly extended in the early 19th century, one of the most attractive extant elements from that period being the pair of shallow bow windows to the rear. Further work took place around 1880 with the addition of servants’ quarters.
Another notable aspect of the house is its deceptive size. From the exterior, The Deeps looks like a relatively modest summer pavilion. While this might have been its initial purpose, the place is now big enough to provide permanent accommodation for a family much bigger than that of the Pearsons.
Downstairs, a line of bells to summon servants indicate that in the 19th century there was a drawingroom, diningroom, smoking room, morningroom and at least six bedrooms but only one bathroom.
Along the centre of the house runs a wide pilastered corridor with sprung vaulting that finishes in three oval top lights. Some of the rooms that open off it retain more original features than others; the two main reception areas – one of them created when two smaller spaces were knocked together – contain really splendid 18th century Adamesque chimneypieces that look as though they were brought from a larger house.
Sadly most of the old floors are gone, replaced 40-odd years ago by harsh parquet; the boards that did survive were buried beneath linoleum. Similarly a lot of the house’s shutters and window entablatures were also pulled out by previous owners. Thanks to the labours of a first-class joiner from nearby Enniscorthy these are gradually being replaced.
The worst of onerous restoration now behind them, the Pearsons can start to turn their attention to more pleasant tasks, such as choosing colours for walls. When, that is, they’re able to take a break from other duties such as collecting fuel for a wood-burning stove that can heat the entire place, hacking back invasive bamboo, protecting soft fruit from the birds, constructing a new woodshed, minding their livestock, tending the vegetable garden . . . evening drinks on the terrace will have to wait.
Peter Pearson has an exhibition of his paintings of houses and architecture in the Pigyard Gallery, Wexford from June 2nd
Irish Historic Houses 