Famous Irish estate owned by Guinness brewery family on the market $38.4 million

This impressive estate which has hosted the likes of the Beatles and Michael Jackson and belongs to Ireland’s most famous brewers – the Guinness family – is now on the market for €28,000,000 ($38.39 million).

​It has a name – Luggala –  and it sits on 2023 hectares in Roundwood, County Wicklow, about 46 kilometres from Dublin. It was modelled on the style of the gothic Strawberry Hill in London, but on a smaller scale as a sporting estate.

With seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a guesthouse and five lodges, it offers space and a great deal of style, as well as quite a bit of history. Luggala was built in 1780s for Peter La Touche, a member of a well-known banking family of French-Huguenot background. 

The current seller is the great-great-great-grandson of the brewery founder Arthur Guinness, arts patron Garech Browne.

He is married to an Indian princess, Harshad Purna Devi, of Morvi,  and after living in the property for 47 years is selling to spend more time in Singapore and London with his wife.

The home came into the family when it was picked up by Ernest Guinness in 1937,  as a present for his daughter Oonagh’s wedding to Lord Dominick Browne. 

Mr Browne’s late brother is Tara Browne, whose death in a car accident is claimed to be the subject of the 1967 Beatles song, Day in the Life. 

Garech Browne had undertaken some major restorations on the property, which is now owned by the family trust, in 1996, spending around €6 million and installing a new library and indoor swimming pool. 

He and his wife sold about £2 million ($3.24 million) of “clutter” from the castle in 2006 to help pay for the renovations. He said at the time that “there was just too much stuff here, some of it too large and I was living with the contents of two houses”.

The 7438-square-metre property itself is somewhat famous, at least as a backdrop. It’s been used as a location in the movies Braveheart, 2004’s King Arthur, the notoriously terrible Sean Connery movie Zardoz, and the television series The Tudors and Vikings.

It also hosted Michael Jackson not long before his death – in 2006 for three months, at a reported €30,000 per week. The project manager at Luggala, Tony Boylan, remembered him as an “absolute gentleman” and recalled that he asked him to remove a painting  – of “the freaky looking guy staring down at him” – from the bedroom he was staying in. 

Mick Jagger, Orlando Bloom, Bono and the Beatles have also been guests.

There’s been some suggestion that the Irish government should buy Luggala as part of efforts to preserve it, but the Minister of State Michael Ring has stated that they can’t afford the price tag.

So, if you can, you’re still in with a chance. Crawford’s and Sotheby’s have the listing.