When we think about “protected structures”, what spring to mind are venerable historic buildings such as the Custom House in Dublin, St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork or the grand Georgian houses on Pery Square in Limerick. Certainly not a flat-roofed glass-and-steel house on stilts in deepest, leafiest Foxrock, in south Dublin.
Tallon House, off Torquay Road on Golf Lane, is not only listed on Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s register of protected structures but also rated as being of national importance in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage – the only private home in this country dating from the latter half of the 20th century with such status.
Designed by Ronnie Tallon, the titanic figure of modernist architecture in Ireland, the serenely beautiful single-storey house stands on a wooded site adjoining Foxrock Golf Club, with views south towards the Dublin Mountains. The site had been a quarry and was completely overgrown when Tallon first spotted its potential in the mid-1960s.
Having bought it for just £2,000, he set about clearing the two-acre site, taking care to save worthwhile trees, and designed a home for himself, his wife, Nora, and their growing family, inspired by his architectural hero Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, near Plano, Illinois, 80km southwest of Chicago.
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Completed in 1951, that house was designed as a weekend retreat for Dr Edith Farnsworth, a busy Chicago physician, and “appears as a structure of platonic perfection” in a complementary landscape that was “an integral aspect of Mies van der Rohe’s aesthetic conception”, according to the US National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The trust acquired Farnsworth House in 2003 from Lord (Peter) Palumbo, who had bought it in 1972 after being rendered “absolutely speechless” by its beauty. I had the pleasure of visiting it in 1999 when the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland had its conference in Chicago, including a “pilgrimage” to the Mies masterpiece.
As a build, it was ill-starred. Dr Farnsworth fell out with Mies after costs soared to $74,000 ($900,000 in today’s money). Two years later the nearby Fox river burst its banks and flooded the house, even though it is raised on pilotis. It flooded again in 1997, requiring the replacement of expensive primavera-mahogany panelling for a second time.
Tallon House is far superior and much more refined. Even when first built, more than 50 years ago, it was significantly larger than Farnsworth, with full-height sliding glazed panels recessed behind the steel frame, allowing for iroko decks on either side. A platform with broad open-riser steps announces its front entrance.
The largely open-plan house was extended twice, first in 1996, to provide an en-suite bathroom and dressingroom at its eastern end, and again in 1998, to create a west-facing study. These additions gave the house its final elongated form. A gate lodge, containing a livingroom, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom, was built in the 1980s.
In 2005 Ronnie and Nora Tallon hosted lunch for the late Terence Riley, architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with the architecture critic Shane O’Toole and myself. Riley was bowled over by the house and its landscape, saying he felt its Miesian spirit much more powerfully than at Farnsworth.
In a rare honour for a private home, the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland awarded the ultramodern house its triennial housing medal for 1971-73. By then Tallon had already won two RIAI gold medals, one for RTÉ Television Centre, in Montrose in Dublin, and the other for his less well-known GEC factory, in Dundalk, Co Louth, bagging both while still in his 30s.
As I wrote in 2010, “if Seán Lemass and TK Whitaker invented modern Ireland, it was Ronnie Tallon, pre-eminently among his peers, who put shape on it, with a range of major buildings that have (mostly) stood the test of time”. These include the former Bank of Ireland HQ on Lower Baggot Street, now fully renovated as Miesian Plaza. Occupied by the Department of Health, it is one of the relatively few modernist buildings on Dublin City Council’s register of protected structures.
Others added to the register more recently include Television Centre (1962) and four other buildings on RTÉ’s Montrose campus, all of which Tallon was involved in designing.
The building that pleased him most was the former Carrolls cigarette factory in Dundalk, later repurposed for educational use. This was where he was able to realise the “simplicity and freedom of the module” that so inspired him at the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, which he visited five times. “It’s like going to Lourdes for a cure,” he told me.
Tallon was awarded the RIAI’s first James Gandon medal for lifetime achievement in 2010, reflecting his stature as “probably Ireland’s greatest architect since the 18th century”, in the words of Paul Keogh, then president of the institute. Tallon died at home in June 2014, at the age of 87. His beloved wife, Nora, lived three years longer.
The house and land at 4 Golf Lane were sold in 2022 for €2.8 million to the Foxrock businessman Derek O’Leary and his wife, Linda, who also own Auburn Lodge, at 3 Golf Lane. Through their family company, Basl Developments, they sought planning permission last August for a flat-roofed, two-storey dwelling in the grounds of Tallon House.
The proposed house, designed by the architect Paul Brazil, was to be located in the southeastern end of the grounds, adjoining a car port and garden studio and screened from Tallon House by new planting, with vehicular access through the existing gates and driveway. A red line around the new house’s site indicated that it would be sold off.
As planned, there was to be a separation distance of just 10 metres from the east gable of Tallon House, and three trees would have to be felled to accommodate the proposed house. But Brazil said it had been “sensitively sited and designed and is appropriate in terms of its proposed scale, mass, height and materials”.
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s conservation officer, Sinéad O’Hara, disagreed. Describing Tallon House as “one of the greatest Irish houses of the 20th century”, she said the sylvan landscape associated with it – “an intrinsic part of the original design concept” – would be adversely affected by the development.
In its decision to refuse permission on October 3rd, the council’s planning department said “the proposed two-storey dwelling by way of its height, design, form and scale would have an overbearing visual impact on the protected structure of Tallon House and would be detrimental to its unique character and setting”.
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When, in 2023, the owners of Ardenza and Glenarm on Torquay Road sought permission for a pair of five-bedroom detached houses in their rear gardens, abutting the southern boundary of Tallon House, Derek O’Leary objected on the basis that this scheme would negatively affect the architectural significance of its designed landscape.
An Bord Pleanála granted permission, saying the two houses proposed “would not adversely affect the character of protected structures in the vicinity of the site”. Now Basl Developments is asking the board to overturn the council’s decision to refuse permission for the proposed two-storey house within the curtilage of Tallon House.
Brazil has submitted a revised scheme under which the car port and garden studio would be demolished and the new dwelling repositioned in their place, 15-18 metres further from Tallon House and screened by a yew hedge. Changes have been made to its design, and two trees are also being retained.
He says it has been designed in a contemporary manner to relate to Tallon House, “but importantly will be clearly legible as a later addition”, an approach that “accords with best conservation practice”. In this case, however, the central issue is that the new addition would intrude into a landscape that is crucial to the setting of Tallon House.
In his submission to An Bord Pleanála, Shane O’Toole draws its attention to a private-edition book, House + Garden (2013), in which Ronnie and Nora Tallon gave a vivid account of how they created their family home and fine-tuned its landscape, describing every single tree. This shows that the house and its curtilage “form a consistently planned singularity”.
I have also made a lengthy submission. It was all I could do, along with writing this article, to honour the memory of a great Irish architect. An Bord Pleanála is due to make its decision by March 13th, 2025.
