The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.
The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?
Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.
We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.
We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.
After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.
No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.
As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.
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