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No. 45 Merrion Square, the home of the Irish Architectural Archive, is one of the great Georgian houses of Dublin. Standing four stories over basement, and five bays wide, the house is situated directly across Merrion Square from Leinster House. It is the largest terraced house on the Square and is the centrepiece of the East Side.

No. 45 Merrion Square

No. 45 Merrion Square, the home of the Irish Architectural Archive, is one of the great Georgian houses of Dublin. Standing four stories over basement, and five bays wide, the house is situated directly across Merrion Square from Leinster House. It is the largest terraced house on the Square and is the centrepiece of the East Side.

In April 1791, Gustavus Hume, surgeon and property developer, leased the plot on which No. 45 stands from a Nicholas Le Favre (who had himself leased it from the Fitzwilliam Estate).

By 1794 the house was under construction, though who Hume hired as architect remains to be definitively discovered. Hume spent the substantial sum of £6,000 providing a building with the scale and grandeur to amplify its occupant’s political and social caché. He found the person he was looking for in the banker, landowner and politician John la Touche MP to whom he sold the house in March 1796 for £6,800.

La Touche set about putting his stamp on the interiors, installing new chimneypieces, paying Robert Morrison for carpentry, and engaging Michael Stapleton and Andrew Callnan to execute plasterwork.

 

Archival photograph of the front of 44 and 45 Merrion Square, 1985

Following the Act of Union, John la Touche’s sons, John and Robert, occupied the house. Both were MPs in the UK Parliament in London and they appear to have run two separate households from a building that was increasingly out-of-scale in post-Union Dublin. John, a bachelor, died in 1820 and Robert subsequently sold his interest in the house to Charles Vereker, 2nd Lord Gort.

In 1824 Lord Gort divided the anachronistically large house into two separate dwellings which were numbered 10 and 11 Merrion Square East. Later that same year Gort sold the smaller part of the divided house (No. 10) to Phillip Doyne. Five year later, in 1829, he sold the larger part (No. 11) to the lawyer Sir Thomas Staples.

Sir Thomas died in No. 11 aged 90 in 1865, the last surviving MP of the Irish House of Commons.

After the death of Sir Thomas Staples, Sir John Banks, Regius Professor of Physic (or Medicine) in Trinity College, moved from  No. 10 Merrion Square East, which he has acquired in 1858, into No. 11. The divided parts of the house were renumbered 44 and 45 Merrion Square c. 1890.

It was when Sir John was in occupancy that the house finally achieved a status for which it had been constructed. It became one of the centres of Dublin social life. No prominent medical visitor came to Dublin without having extended to them the generous hospitality which Sir John dispensed in his splendidly decorated reception rooms. Viceroy after viceroy also dined with him in the house.

 

Archival photograph of first floor rooms in 45 Merrion Square, c. 1900
Archival photograph of the rear of 45 Merrion Square, 1985

Sir John Banks died in 1910, and both parts of the building fell vacant. They remained so until 1912 when the whole property was leased by the Office of Public Works and used to accommodate the clerical offices of the National Health Insurance Company. The OPW purchased the house in 1926.

With single occupancy restored, a form of internal circulation was created and additional facilities, including a large toilet block to the rear, were added. Various Government departments and agencies moved in and out over the years but by the 1950s the building was primarily the home of the Patents and Trade Marks Office. Patent files were stored in the basement. A patents reading room occupied two ground floor rooms and a patents court sat on the first floor. The Patents Office was decentralised to Kilkenny in 1996.

The house was assigned to the IAA by Ruairí Quinn TD, Minister for Finance, in his budget of 1996, and the process of making the building suitable for use by the IAA began.

From the start the project was conceived as falling into two distinct parts – the restoration and refurbishment of the 1790s house to provide public and staff facilities and the construction of new archival stores to house the collections. The programme of repair saw the careful removal of the interventions caused by the division of the house in 1824. The reinstatement of the original plan has allowed the once-grand spaces of the house to re-emerge, but No. 44 disappeared as a house number on Merrion Square.

The building programme for No. 45 also entailed the construction of new archival stores to accommodate the growing collections. These were built underground to the rear of the old house and are designed to provide the exacting storage environment demanded for the long term preservation of paper documents in a passive way without the use of mechanical air-conditioning. This was the first time that this ‘green’ solution was used for archival storage in Ireland.

This marriage of careful architectural conservation and cutting-edge sustainable building technology made the task of transforming No. 45 Merrion Square uniquely challenging. The Office of Public Works deserve great credit for the innovative approach adopted in this project.

Excavation of site for passive archival repository to the rear of No. 45 Merrion Square, 2003

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