How a gin-selling Wall Street banker bought and restored his ancestral west Cork castle

Irish Times

3 days ago

When Stephen Ralfe Evans-Freke, a retired Wall Street banker, bought back the castle that had been in his family for generations, an oil painting of it had already followed him across the Atlantic. And back again.
The estate actually comprises two castles, Castle Freke, and nearby Rathbarry Castle, in a townland east of Rosscarberry,
west Cork
. It had been
the homestead
for centuries, until 1921.
'As a child I was brought here by my father on a cold and windy day,' he says, recalling the first time he saw the ancestral home in real life. 'It was forlorn and overgrown, although nothing like when I bought it.'
The purchase took place 25 years ago, at the turn of the millennium. The way he tells it, it was as if the fates intervened to unite him with his heritage.
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He was at the christening of an Irish friend in London, when that man's father came 'stomping over to tell him that the family pile was for sale'. On a roll, he didn't stop there either. 'I gather you've done well in the States,' he stated, barking, 'What's the matter with you boy? You should be buying it back.'
Evans-Freke had indeed done well. He studied law at Cambridge and went to South Africa in 1972 to work with IBM, building the first computer programme for valuing gold mines.
Four years later, he moved to New York and became an investment banker working on Wall Street.
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The oil painting of his stately Castle Freke had hung in the playroom of the house where he grew up, now the Ashbourne House Hotel, Co Meath. It followed him to England when the family moved there for work. His father, the late Peter Evans-Freke, the 11th Lord Carbery, was an engineer. Stephen took it with him when he went away to university at Cambridge. One night he told a friend, after consuming a large amount of single malt, that he was going to buy the house back.
After the London christening and back in Dublin, he says, he felt his feet 'turning of their own accord' into an upmarket estate agency to ask if that had any castles for sale in Co Cork. And that was it. On the eve of the millennium he made good on that promise. He doesn't say exactly how much he paid for it, but intimates that it was somewhere below €500,000.
Solomonic columns at Castle Freke, west Cork.
Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
During his time stateside, he had gained some experience of historic construction, having redone a large period house in Tuxedo Park in upstate New York. It should have taught him a lesson to steer clear, but it didn't, although nothing could have prepared him for the task at hand in west Cork.
Meanwhile around Castlefreke, word had gotten out that the property had a new old owner, and he was approached to come see the restoration works at the local school.
'The parish priest was in attendance, the post mistress, kids in costumes. There was tea, china, children singing and with all of the village dancing.'
While it sounds like an episode from the Irish RM, it was a warm welcome back to the parish and its talented stonemasons and other tradespeople.
The restoration started about four years after he bought it, in 2004, when he also bought Rathbarry Castle. A manor house, it lies about a field over from Freke, is built on a lower level and within the walls of an earlier abode. It is where he now resides, and loves living there.
Stephen Evans-Freke's home, Rathbarry Castle, Castlefreke, west Cork. Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
Construction companies were already on the scent of a big job.
'There was a knock on the door, and someone came to me to tell me that the word was out across Munster and if you want in here's the deal: It involved very large numbers and mark ups and how it was to be split between subcontractor and the people running the business,' he explains.
'I decided not to do it the conventional way,' he says.
He had visited an architectural firm 'who promised to assemble a dream team,' he recalls. 'A couple of months later the idea was presented. There were about 20 people in the large meeting room, who spent about an hour and a half describing what they were going to do. One and a half million euro was the fee to detail what needed to be done and how much these works would cost,' he explains. 'That's with no one picking up a spade or a shovel.'
So, he proceeded with the works, hiring Steve Hancock as his project manager, who subcontracted various trades and craftspeople, including master stonemason Mícheál O'Sullivan.
View to the west from battlements of Castle Freke, west Cork.
Pic Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
Built on a bluff, on a clear day, you can see from Castle Freke all the way to the Fastnet Lighthouse in the Atlantic. It extends to 4,645 sq m (50,000 square feet) but, if you factor in towers and courtyards, he says, he concentrated on about half of that, 2,313 sq m (25,000 square feet).
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The property's 40-plus chimneys have been relined. The battlements, knocked for their lead in the 1950s, have been repaired, as have many external walls surrounding the castle.
But it is in the decorative plasterwork in the property's principal rooms on the piano nobile where the most dramatic visible changes can be seen. Work began about eight years ago on the fan vaulted ceilings of the music room. It was, he says, very organic. 'There were no mood boards to work to. It was free form and a team effort.'
Restored Music Room at Castle Freke, west Cork.
Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
He loved the high point of Irish Georgian decorative art when a lot of newly wealthy landowners brought in Italian craftsmen, or
stuccodores
, to decorate their interiors. 'The Irish brought a level of creativity and whimsy to it. I wanted it to be authentically Irish, not bound by the classicism of that time.'
The two principal
stuccodores
were Kevin Holbrook and Dolcie Keogh. In recognition of their restoration work, the pair were recently appointed with the title of master plasterers of The Worshipful Company of Plasterers, a 500-year-old City of London livery company – a guild or professional association that has its origins in the city's medieval times. Keogh is the first woman master plasterer in the company's long history.
Plaster and scagliola specialist Kevin Holbrook at Castle Freke, west Cork.
Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
In addition to renovating the castle, Stephen is also launching a super-premium gin in the US market this autumn.
The genesis of this side hustle is that he is a dry martini drinker, and felt that there wasn't a gin being made for this classic drink – 'a wonderful punctuation between the working day and the time to enjoy family and friends'.
About 10 years ago, while overseeing the works at Castle Freke, he spent several months recovering from foot surgery. To entertain himself, he ordered 120 essential oils and a large stock of vodka and set up a laboratory at the dining room table of Rathbarry Castle, spending an hour or two each evening mixing botanicals, all the while watched over by the family oil painting.
Stephen Evans-Freke with his premium gin and dry martini. Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
He and his favourite tipple are now immortalised in plasterwork within an intricate frieze on the grand staircase hall. He is a rotund mole holding a martini glass. The staircase swoops around and on up to the bedrooms. Above it, the Children of Lir are in relief, designed to represent his Irish heritage.
In the ballroom, in stucco, you can see one of the Arthurian legends showing the Lady of the Lake presenting Arthur with the Excalibur sword, which pays homage to his Welsh Celt background, on the Evans side of the family.
Odin with two wolves Geri and Freki in plaster at Castle Freke, west Cork.
Photograph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
In the saloon is another stucco work, this time of Norse god Odin with his two wolves, one of whom is called Freke, and represents the Freke's Viking lineage. Another standout example of the workmanship can be seen in the fan ceilings of the music room.
Underfoot, there remains a concrete floor where he plans to lay inlaid stone floors with parquet in the bedrooms and some of the lesser reception rooms. So far, no rewiring or replumbing has been carried out.
How much money has the work cost so far?
Describing it as 'a pay-as-you-go project'– he received no grant aid – he estimates he's paid out between €500,000 and €1 million a year for the last 20 years or so. That amounts to somewhere between €10-€20 million.
'There's no way that you can recapture that money purely from a financial point of view,' he concedes. 'To be clear, I never saw this as a 'financial investment'. It's more about heritage, an opportunity to leave behind something for future generations, a rare privilege.
'Our time here is pretty fleeting, and it gives me a deep, deep satisfaction that I did something with my money that will outlast me.'
Ground floor restoration at Castle Freke, west Cork. Photoraph: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision
It's still not finished yet: all utilities are yet to be installed, and the bedroom floor and half-basement need to be finished. But this requires decisions on the final use of the place.
'Once those decisions are taken, I estimate another three years to complete the main block of the castle,' he says.
Does he plan to take up residence the castle at some stage? 'I had thought that I'd live in the castle, but a castle is an inconvenient place as a private house. If you have to let the dog out in the middle of the night, you've to take quite a journey to get to the outside door,' he says.
'Is the best use of the place a family home?' he asks. With that in mind, he's carried out a feasibility study to determine if it could be turned it into a super-luxury hotel property. 'But before we do the practical, we're focused on the important still impractical stuff.
'Sometimes more is less,' he says.