The Hotel
With just fifteen rooms for its 600 acre estate, Ballyfin is becoming famous as a unique hotel offering unparalleled privacy, discretion and luxury. It affords guests the opportunity to admire, and enjoy, the union of art, architecture, interior and landscape design which coalesces in the Irish country house. The kitchen is run by Fred Cordonnier, formerly head chef at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, Dublin.
The whole house is available for single bookings. Demesne facilities offered include biking, boating and canoeing on the lake, coarse fishing, tennis, croquet, lawnbowls, hurling, Gaelic football, American football, badminton, picnics, horticultural demonstrations. Archery, clay-pigeon shooting, falconry and horse-riding can also be arranged. House activities include a swimming pool, gym with services of a personal trainer, treatment rooms offering the Voya organic seaweed range, wine tasting, whiskey tasting, cookery demonstrations, history tour, traditional & classical music, Irish folklore story-telling.
The grounds which had for several generations previously been open for use by locals for walking, fishing and other recreational activities when the house was run as a school have been closed however and the lands are now available for the high paying hotel guests only. The gates are permanently locked banning local access.
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Famous quotes containing the word hotel:
“A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious “retreat” of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.”
—William Least Heat Moon [William Trogdon] (b. 1939)