For Richard, there’s no place like ‘hometels’

Damian McCarney

'I love it like this,” says Richard Corrigan over the din of a passing JCB churning up the soil; his refined accent can be heard without being raised. The Celt finds the renowned chef clad in regulation blue jeans, black work boots and a chin full of week-old stubble, he certainly looks like a man of the land – only a natty woollen sports jacket of earthy hues might set him apart from the farmers nodding their way to a bargain at the mart rings.
He’s professing his love as he’s traipsing lightly over rivets of freshly upturned muck as clambering diggers clear the overgrowth at his latest project – transforming the run down Park Hotel into a working farm which will produce fresh fruit and veg to supply his three restaurants in England. What Richard’s professing his love for is orchestrating a tightly-run project, with a Michelin star chef’s eye for detail.
“Empty, derelict,” he says scanning the acre or two of the walled garden that’s having fir trees lining the perimeter uprooted in preference for expanding the indigenous breeds, and all manner of vegetables. “You come in six months again and it’s going to be a hive of activity.”
He’s eager to keep the tree varieties Irish.
“It has the most fabulous amount of old beeches and old oaks. Look at the old oak in the garden - look at that old oak.”
The Celt turns at Richard's insistence to scan a broccoli head of trees, too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know upon which specific tree to lavish his praise.
“But look at it,” Richard persists.
The Celt musters an enthusiastic “Mmm.”
“It’s picture postcard,” confirms the chef.
Are you missing cooking?
“Ah no, this is part of cooking really. Your preparation is called ‘mise en place’ a lovely phrase - preparation before commencing. You have to prepare your gardens before you grow anything. I realised very quickly if I wasn’t here, it wasn’t going to happen - not in the sense that nothing would have been done - it just wouldn’t have happened in the way I’d wanted it. Basically, I want this place to have a certain image of how things are done, and the standards we put in are the foundations of it.
“You could easily get a gardening consultant to come in here and say - ‘Design me everything’, and they’d make it all pretty. But you would feel you’re not part of it. Coming from a farming background. I want to be part of it. My hands and my feet are well in the soil here.”
Actually Richard’s hands and feet originate from soil not very far away - in Ballivor, County Meath. He proudly recalls that his father played a role in cleaning up Lough Sheelin back in the day “when the pig guys used to pump their slurry into it”, he says with a warm smile which seldom strays too far from his face.

It emerges that Richard had long harboured this farm-to-fork plan, and wasn’t necessarily fixated on this particular stately home. Big houses in Waterford and Cork were also considered.

“It is a fabulous property, a hundred-plus acres within a town boundary - it doesn’t exist anymore.
“There’s lots of these places up a mountain, or 20 miles from nowhere, but put it in this situation, it’s just magic.”
Passing the antiquated red brick buildings of the walled garden, we enter a sizeable seedling nursery and Richard wonders:
“What are we potting up here?”
“Tomatoes,” responds Prescilla O’Reilly, the Ballyjamesduff gardener crouched over black regiments of propagator trays primed with sturdy shoots. Above, a verdant arch of vines span the room of corrugated plastic, promising, as Richard says, the “fantastic sight” of bushels of grapes come October.
“What we intend to do is, for 10 months of the year, to be self-sufficient. Now, that’s a big ask, with our operations in London.”
It is a big ask to supply Corrigan’s Mayfair, Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill and Bentley’s Sea Grill in Harrods. The big answer lies, in part at least, in a trio of 30mx30m polytunnels earmarked for a section of the property close to his hitherto-neglected orchard: “They’re massive,” he remarks of the polytunnels, which could well be in place as you read this. “You could drive tractors through those.”

Business

“This is not some kind of dream,” he stresses, “this is a business. All parts of these estates [in previous centuries] were businesses. They bred animals and they sold them at the market.”
You’re doing the same?
“I’d like to bring back a sense that this is a business, otherwise it could be a very big folly indeed; I mean a really big folly. Our refrigerated vans are ready, which will do the London gig every week - and that starts in four weeks’ time.”
Attempting to breathe new life into this stately home, has given Richard a vantage point from which to acknowledge the sheer scale of the endeavour behind what might be termed ‘big house businesses’ of the past.
“The Taylors took hold of this in the 1600s,” he explains. “They were quite progressive in many ways, they were the second wave of emigration into Ireland.
“These landscape Norman castles and these old Anglo-Irish houses, we weren’t brought up with the happiest of feelings towards them, because it was a form of occupation, but I think the time is right to re-evaluate what they are and the part they played in our society, and we shouldn’t feel hostility towards them, we should feel, wow, what an undertaking, what an endeavour!”
The land transferred to Headfort family, who had a claim on everything between Kells and Virginia. For the Headforts, Richard’s palatial, newly-acquired property was merely a hunting lodge, where they decamped for the summer; although it was, reportedly, their favourite property. Richard is eager to bring elements of this hunting lodge tradition back, to make more sense of the layout of the property. For those used to the old Park Hotel, Richard has turned the property on its axis to match its original design and intention. Now, you access the property from the main Cavan-Virginia Road and drive up a lane, flanked by the walled garden and orchard, and into a newly-levelled parking area recovered from wasteland. A beautifully restored mid-nineteenth century courtyard - Bective Court providing 15 two-bedrooms apartments - stands to the visitor’s right. On the visitor’s left is the newly positioned front entrance, reception, and just a few steps further beyond, bar.
“I call it my Soho Bar,” he says admiring its more modern, gleaming surfaces.
Proceeding to the front of the house the swellegance levels rise with the opulently decorated dining quarters. On the first floor are the premium accommodation, which afford the most breath taking part – the view over the newly designed French garden, beyond the golf course, to the mighty Lough Ramor.

Market price

Richard’s the perfect host, engaging, passionate, ebullient and obliging to a fault. For two hours, he’s seemingly determined to show us around all 100 or so acres, highlighting the property’s occasional shortcomings amplified by years of neglect, whilst delighting in its many more glories. Even when we think he’s exhausted the tour, he whisks us off in his 4x4 to admire a mound of impossibly dense bluebells astride a badger’s set, and see his newly-renovated (and judging by a missing plank in the wooden door, even more newly-vandalised) boat house.
Back indoors, he shows us to one of the more developed areas. He even shows off the ladies’ WC.
“I’d live in this room,” coos the photographer, admiring the beautiful decor.
“It took two and a half just to put in the floor,” he says.
“Two and a half days?”
“Weeks”.
Recalling that the auctioneer selling the former Park Hotel, DNG Properties had been looking for offers around the €900,000 mark, the Celt, then opines, “You got this place for a steal but you’ve spent a ferocious amount of money”.
“I love how people say ‘You bought it for a steal’,” he says in a mock-offended tone. “There’s a thing called market price. Get off that Irish, Cavan bullshit – ‘You got it for a steal’. I got it for market price. I’m in business – there wasn’t a queue waiting to get in here – although there was – and clearly I beat them to it.”
Unsure if I’ve just been chided, we move on to a range of small rooms, which after a spot of hunting the gentry would have used basically to remove wet clothes, get scrubbed and dressed for dinner - rather than to relax in. The Celt, more tactfully broaches the fact that the rooms in this part of the house are rather “petite”.
“Yeah they are. But you know – fair point – once they’re comfortable... this isn’t the Ritz Carlton, it never was – it’s a house. It’s not fifty square metres full of cheap furniture. What do you come to a hotel for?”
At a loss for words at the time, the Celt later reflects that he and Mrs Celt occasionally splash out on a hotel to break the norm - to feel a little spoilt. While you wouldn’t feel spoilt in a hunter’s lodge, Richard brings us to one of the few upstairs rooms that’s finished - it is a nicely-sized bright room with a stunning view down to the lough.
“I’m more of a homemaker,” he says before declaring that he’s banning “hang-ups from the 1960s”, such as coffee makers and hairdryers in each room.
Richard later stresses the ‘homemaker’ dimension as key to his plans.
“I’m not a hotelier, and I’m never going to be a hotelier, and hence I always use the word ‘hometel’ for this place. This is a home with hotel facilities, and that’s what I want it to be.”
When the ‘hometel’ will be open for business is impossible to tell, given the epic scale of the work involved.
One thing for sure, is that it will open in stages.
“You couldn’t tackle this whole house in one go; this would put you in a big, big hole, in a big wooden box.”

'Where tourism was invented'

Conscious of the threat that this project could become “a really big folly”, and having considered similar properties in Waterford and Cork, what made him take plump for this particular house in a part of the world that’s not quite a tourism magnet?
“I initially just went pfff,” he exhales. “Not too sure. And then I had a look and realised the amount of tourism that was here. This part of Ireland in the 1950s and ’60s was where tourism was invented. You have to understand that.
“There must have been two or three members from Cavan on the original board of Bord Fáilte in the 1950s. Tourism between the lakes and the fishing that was going on was huge. I think the conflict in the late ’60s in Northern Ireland certainly brought people away from the border region – it just did – end of story.
“I honestly think there is a golden time coming. I’m not sure it’s going to happen; everyone’s going to have to work at it. No successes have come my way easily. I’ve worked very, very, very f***ing hard to get to where I am.
That doesn’t say that you don’t deserve it or you do, but with hard work you will find success – there’s no question about it.”