The Swiss Cottage: An Irish Cottage Orné

A cottage orné is a rich family's idea of a peasant cottage — deliberately rustic, expensively built, and never actually lived in. The Swiss Cottage at Kilcommon near Cahir is a noted example: thatched, with a curving roofline and timber verandas on several sides, put up around 1810 and attributed to John Nash, the Regency architect who later remodelled Buckingham Palace. It belonged to the estate of Lord and Lady Cahir, who used it for entertaining, and some rooms keep their original Dufour wallpapers, said to be among the first commercially produced Parisian papers. After years of neglect it was restored from 1985 by the Irish Georgian Society, the Port Royal Foundation and Sybil Connolly, and opened as a museum in 1989. It sits in its own grounds on the River Suir.