1–3 KILDARE STREET, DUBLIN
By Damian Murphy
The Kildare Street Club can trace its origins back to 1782, when William Conyngham (1733–96), blackballed from his usual haunt at Daly’s Club in Dame Street, established a rival club in a townhouse at 6 Kildare Street. Daly’s Club faltered and the Kildare Street Club flourished, resulting in the need for larger premises. The design for a new clubhouse, a large structure on the corner of Kildare Street and Leinster Street, was entrusted to Deane and Woodward on the strength of their recently completed Museum Building (1852–7), a stone’s throw away in Trinity College.
Whereas clubhouses in London generally adopted conservative Classical and Italianate styles, Deane and Woodward broke the mould in Dublin with an eye-catching Venetian palazzo, Byzantine in detailing, fashionably Ruskinian in palette, its walls of orange- and puce-toned red brick decorated with horizontal bands and string-courses of Drogheda limestone and Portland stone, its overhanging eaves finished with a dogtooth cornice on double beaded corbels.
The façades—asymmetrical on the Kildare Street side, symmetrical on the Leinster Street side—are each given distinctive focal points, with a balconied arcaded portico on the former, its medallions carrying the intertwined monogram of the club (‘KSC’), and a two-storey bay window on the latter commanding rus-in-urbe vistas over College Park.
The coupled and tripled windows are set in cambered frames with paired columns and two-tone voussoirs. The carving of the capitals is intricate—life-like birds taking shelter in three-dimensional leaves—but the carving around the bases, particularly those at street level, rewards the attention of the passer-by. The tableaux include a lute-playing fox, a greyhound chasing a hare and a pair of monkeys playing billiards while a third covers its ears to drown out the din. The authorship of the carving has been debated, one account naming Charles Purdy, a second the O’Shea Brothers, with a third naming no one but remarking that ‘the professional firm supervising the work very liberally allows competent workmen a consistent latitude in producing forms’.
The new Kildare Street Club boasted all the comforts of a first-class clubhouse, including on the ground floor a morning room, a coffee room, billiard rooms and a smoking room, and on the first floor a drawing room, a card room and a dining room. The uppermost floor was equipped with fifteen bedrooms for members overnighting in the city. Its most spectacular interior, the top-lit arcaded hall, featured a winding staircase with balustrades of sunburst perforations and a flying buttress upper flight soaring through the air in an architectural tour-de-force.
In a reversal of fortunes, the Kildare Street Club, once over-subscribed, saw a steady decline in membership, and in 1954 it was decided to lease a portion of its premises as offices. The destruction of the interior in 1971 has been called ‘the most singular act of architectural vandalism in recent Dublin history’. The Kildare Street Club merged with the Dublin University Club in 1976, the restyled Kildare Street and University Club having its headquarters in St Stephen’s Green, and the clubhouse is now occupied by Alliance Française and offices of the National Library of Ireland.
Damian Murphy is Architectural Heritage Officer, NIAH. Series based on the NIAH’s ‘building of the month’ www.buildingsofireland.ie.