THE DUBLIN TOWN HOUSE - Dublin.ie

THE DUBLIN TOWN HOUSE
To mark the publication of The Eighteenth-Century Dublin Town House, Dr. Christine Casey,
editor and contributor to the publication will present a lunchtime lecture entitled
PLAIN POMP: THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DUBLIN TOWN HOUSE
THURSDAY 21ST OCTOBER , 1PM - 2PM
WOOD QUAY VENUE, CIVIC OFFICES, WOOD QUAY, DUBLIN 8.
ALL ARE WELCOME. ATTENDANCE IS FREE.
Four Courts Press

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
DUBLIN TOWN HOUSE
CHRISTINE CASEY, editor
This volume draws together the disciplines of architecture, history
and art history to produce a multi-faceted picture of the eighteenthcentury
city dwelling. Discussion includes the financing of speculative
development, the sourcing and working of building materials and the
decoration of house interiors by master craftsmen. The lives lived in
these houses are also illuminated by essays on house contents, on the
taxes paid by house occupants and on the views or prospects which,
as today, were often the subject of dispute. A dinner book of the mid
eighteenth century records in remarkable detail the sumptuous and
exotic meals enjoyed in these houses while nineteenth-century records
evoke the deprivation suffered by tenement dwellers.
This illustrated public lecture will present an overview of the
eighteenth-century Dublin house, its builders, occupants and physical
form.

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
DUBLIN TOWN HOUSE:
FORM, FUNCTION & FINANCE
1. Niall McCullough The Dublin house
2. Brendan Twomey Financing speculative property
development in early eighteenthcentury
Dublin
3. Christine Casey The Dublin domestic formula
4. Robin Usher Domestic Architecture, the old city,
and the suburban challenge, c.1660-
1700
5. Susan Roundtree Brick in the eighteenth-century
Dublin town house
6. Tony Hand Supplying stone for the Dublin
house
7. Finola O’Kane 'Bargains in View': The Fitzwilliam
family's development of Merrion
Square
8. Patricia McCarthy From parlours to pantries:
inventories and the eighteenthcentury
Dublin interior
9. Alison FitzGerald 'Taste in High Life': dining in the
Dublin townhouse
10. Edward McParland The geometry of the stable lane

11. Sarah Rhiannon Drumm ‘Fine Rooms Increase Wants’: town
houses of Irish MPs
12. Jacinta Prunty The town house as tenement in
nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury
Dublin
13. Loreto Calderón & New light on Hugh Montgomerie,
Konrad Dechant Richard Castle and Number 85
Saint Stephen’s Green
14. John Montague Leitrim House: a re-assessment
15. Lynda Mulvin Charlemont’s neighbours: Coláiste
Mhuire, Parnell Square in context
16. Joseph McDonnell Patrons and plasterers: the origin of
Dublin rococo stuccowork
17. Conor Lucey Classicism or commerce? The
townhouse interior as commodity
18. Peter Guillery Plan form: Some comparative
thoughts from London
19. Alistair Rowan The town house in the capital of
North Britain

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
DUBLIN TOWN HOUSE:
Contributors
Toby Barnard has been fellow and tutor in history at Hertford College, Oxford, since 1976. His
recent books include A new anatomy of Ireland (2003); Making the Grand Figure: lives and possessions in
Ireland, 1641-1700 (2004) and Improving Ireland? Projectors, prophets and profiteers, 1641-1786 (2008). He
is a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. Between
2006 and 2009 he held a Leverhulme senior research fellowship, working on the cultures of print
in Ireland between 1680 and the 1790s
Niall McCullough studied architecture in UCD and works as a director of McCullough Mulvin
Architects. He is interested in research, teaching and building and is the author or co-author of a
number of books and articles on Dublin and on Irish architecture.
Brendan Twomey has been a banker in Dublin for over thirty years. His published works include
Smithfield and the parish of St Paul. 1695-1750 (2005) and Dublin in 1707, a year in the life of the city
(2009), both in the Maynooth Studies in Local History series. Current research projects include a
biographical essay on the antiquarian and historian Francis Elrington Ball and a study of the visual
representation of the Salmon Leap falls in Leixlip over the past three centuries.
Christine Casey is a senior lecturer in architectural history in the Department of the History of
Art and Architecture at Trinity College. She has written widely on the history of Irish architecture
and is author and co-author of two volumes in the Buildings of Ireland series, North-Leinster (1993)
and Dublin (2005).
Robin Usher is a researcher at the University of Oxford. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin,
and Cambridge University, where he received a PhD for a thesis on Dublin’s political iconography
in the period 1660-1760. A book on the same topic, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is in press.
Susan Roundtree studied architecture at the Dublin Institute of Technology. She completed the
Master of Urban & Building Conservation (UCD) in 1992 and obtained a Master of Letters
(TCD) in 1999 for research on the history of brickwork in Ireland. She is a senior architect with

Dublin City Council, and an accredited Conservation Architect (RIAI). She is co-author, with
Gerard Lynch and Shaffrey Associates, of the Advice Series publication on the repair of historic
brickwork.
Tony Hand is employed as an engineer for a mining company. He is currently engaged in
research at Trinity College Dublin for a PhD on the Colles family and the Kilkenny marble works.
He has recently published several related articles in Irish architectural and decorative studies.
Finola O’Kane is a lecturer in architecture and conservation in the School of Architecture,
Landscape and Civil Engineering, University College Dublin. She is author of Landscape design in
eighteenth-century Ireland (2004) and joint editor of Georgian Ireland (2008).
Patricia McCarthy is an architectural historian and author of ‘A favourite study’: building the King’s
Inns (2006). She has published numerous essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish
architecture.
Alison FitzGerald lectures in the Department of History at NUI Maynooth. She specializes in
design history, in particular the history of goldsmiths, jewellers and allied traders.
Edward McParland is a fellow emeritus of Trinity College Dublin where he has lectured in the
Department of the History of Art since 1973. He published James Gandon, Vitruvius Hibernicus in
1985, and Public architecture in Ireland, 1680-1760 in 2001. With Nicholas Robinson he founded the
Irish Architectural Archive
Sarah Rhiannon Drumm completed an MA (NUI Dublin) in 2002 on the pastel artist Rosalba
Carriera, before going on to complete an MLitt (NUI Dublin) in 2007 on the eighteenth-century
Dublin townhouse. She is currently working in Christ Church Cathedral.
Jacinta Prunty is a senior lecturer in the Department of History, NUI Maynooth. She has
published in the fields of map history, slum geography, and the history of religious congregations
and city missions; she is co-ordinator of the MA in Historical Archives now offered by the
Department of History.
Loreto Calderón holds an MA in the history of art from UCD (2008) and was research assistant
for the Dublin volume in the Buildings of Ireland series. She now conducts independent research on
aspects of Irish and European art history.
Konrad Dechant has worked in Newman House, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin for the last ten

years under the curator Ruth Ferguson. He took Greek and Biblical Studies at Trinity College,
Dublin, and has an MPhil from TCD.
John Montague is currently working on the Royal Irish Academy Art and Architecture of Ireland
project, Volume IV, Architecture 1600-2000. He has recently completed a PhD at the Department of
the History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College, on the subject of John Rocque’s Exact Survey
of Dublin, 1756. He has worked on conservation plans for historic buildings in Dublin and
elsewhere and has published on a wide range of Irish architectural topics from medieval cloisters to
the modernist Dublin suburb of Ballymun.
Lynda Mulvin is a lecturer in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD. She has a
specialist background and interest in classical antiquity and architectural history. She is currently
working on C.R. Cockerell and neo-classicism.
Joseph McDonnell has written on the fine and decorative arts including Irish eighteenth-century
stuccowork and its European sources (1991), Art of the penal era (1995) and 500 years of the art of the book in
Ireland (1997). He is currently completing a study of the destroyed book-bindings of the manuscript
journals of the eighteenth-century Irish parliament with a detailed catalogue of the individual tools.
Conor Lucey is the author of The Stapleton Collection: designs for the Irish neo-classical interior (2007), a
study of the eighteenth-century Dublin stuccodore Michael Stapleton. He has recently been
appointed editor of the Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, the journal of the Irish Georgian
Society.
Peter Guillery is a Senior Historian for the Survey of London, which continues from within
English Heritage. His books on London’s buildings include The small house in eighteenth-century London
(2004) and (with Neil Burton) Behind the Façade, London House Plans 1660-1840 (2006).
Alistair Rowan trained as an architect in Edinburgh and taught for ten years in the Department
of Fine Art in Edinburgh University during which time he served as a member of the Edinburgh
New Town Conservation Committee advising the Secretary of State for Scotland on the protection
and future of the Georgian city. He was appointed professor of the History of Art in UCD in 1977
and Slade professor of art in Oxford in 1988, when he lectured on the architecture of Robert
Adam. In 1990 he returned to Edinburgh as Principal of the College of Art. He also set up the
Department of the History of Art in UCC between 2001 and 2003 and now lives in retirement in
central Dublin.