Saltburn fans can now rent a huge stately home - and there's a secret wine room

03 February 2024 , 07:00

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Barry O'Donnell bought Orlagh House outside Dublin (Image: Supplied)

A chartered surveyor has become an honorary member of the landed gentry by buying a sprawling country pile.

Since its release, Saltburn has had a similar effect on the British public of 2024 as Brideshead Revisited did in the early 80s - in that everyone is secretly wishing they went to Oxbridge and were in line to inherit a sizable manor house.

According to Expedia Group’s Unpack ’24 travel trends report, more than half of travellers say they’ve researched or booked a trip to a destination after seeing it on a TV show or movie, and one in four admit that TV shows and films are even more influential on their travel plans than they were before.

While it may not be possible to change your family lineage, one man has climbed to the top of the property ladder by buying a vast stately home in the Irish countryside.

Where Saltburn is shot in Drayton house, a 127-room privately owned manor in Northamptonshire, Barry O'Donnell's property is a 32 bed, former retirement home for priests called Orlagh House which dates back to 1790.

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The 49-year-old Londoner saw the vast house appear for sale seven years ago close to where he grew up, on the outskirts of Dublin. Since 1872 an order of monks had owned the home, using it as a place to train priests and then to house elderly members of the church.

The house has been filled full of furniture Barry bought from antique shops (Orlagh House)

"Irish priests used to be sent to Belgium to get trained, but then it was decided they would do it in Ireland at Orlagh House. It was a religious training college, then the Augustinian order used it for retreats, an old age person's home for priests. When I first went I ran into all these 90-year-old priests. It was a very hard house to heat and cost a lot of money to run."

Barry scraped together enough cash to buy the property and the 100 acres which came with it, and set about bringing in a team of decorators and builders to transform the "spartan" home into a stately manor fit for large groups of guests who would be staying there.

"We brought 32 bedrooms down to 14. We knocked down walls, combined bedrooms, and put in ensuites. We were trying to give the house a much more stately home feel."

The renovation saw the number of bedrooms halved (Orlagh House)

Traces of the property's former function have been kept, including the working organ in the oratory and a couple of pews left by the order. While the lack of a protestant reformation and age of the home means there was no need for a priest hole, there is a spooky secret door in the cellar leading to a wine store - possibly a feature introduced by its first owner, snuff merchant and suspected smuggler Lundy Foot.

Since its refurbishment Orlagh House is more likely to put-up large families looking to roleplay as landed gentry than 18th century Irish merchants.

"When you're staying there as a family you can live that kind of dream," Barry said of Orlagh House, which he now rents out on Vrbo. "People tend to stay in the house longer than they intended to. It is a brilliant place for a murder mystery. People put on blacktie and dress up. We've done a few fancy dress parties."

The house was decorated by Barry and his family. "Given we're not oligarchs, we decorated it ourselves. I had great fun doing that, " he said. "Any time I drove around London I went into antiques store and came out with loads of stuff. Anything old looks good in this house."

Barry lets the property out for large groups of holidaymakers and functions (Orlagh House)

Those who stay there are put up in the plushly decorated house filled with squidgy soft furnishings, four-poster bunk beds, a grand dining area and a hall large enough for weddings and parties.

"We're basically on the side of the Dublin mountains, in front it's an uninterrupted view of Dublin, day or night, it is 30 minutes to Temple Bar," Barry said.

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The house can sleep 30 people. During the off season it costs £22,609 a week (£108 per person, per night, in summer £33,973 (£162 per person, per night) and at Christmas £42,414 (£202 per person per night).

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Milo Boyd