Country Retreat
Pulling up to Brian Brody’s house in Ballynabrocky in the Wicklow Mountains is, in some ways, like travelling into a pastoral Disney movie. As we veer off the more civilised roads in Manor Kilbride we soon find ourselves rattling along increasingly grassy trails with overgrown brambles poking at us through the open windows. Brody’s pig sty (literally) is magical. Upon entering this woodland idyll, there are butterflies fluttering around the rooms, and Brian tells us that a family of deer often wander into the garden, a new fawn has recently been born. He has his very own Bambi.
What was once a stone shed for rearing pigs is now a bright, whitewashed and wooden retreat that Brian describes as, ‘The first place I’ve ever truly felt at home’. The house, sitting alongside a 250-year old converted cottage, belonged to the painter Patrick Scott and was sold to Brody’s best friend, the restaurateur Ben Gorman, about 16 years ago. After spates of renting it out while moving himself from one property to another, Gorman finally moved back into the original cottage and offered the renovated shed to Brody at the beginning of this year: ‘My relationship had finished, he had just come back from Spain and we were both at similar stages in life so we decided to join forces and get Ballynabrocky back to its former glory’.
The result is a very stylised, but not polished, space that exudes both Brian’s and Ben’s personal styles as well as that of the history of the building (a pair of Scott’s wooden skis hang on the kitchen wall). Over the past 16 years Brian had been visiting the house with friends for gatherings and parties. In fact, before the shed was properly converted it had been used as a ‘rave hall’ which amuses him now as the space has morphed into his centre of peace and tranquility. A musician by trade, Brian spends a large portion of his time gigging in town or playing internationally and, rather than feeling isolated up here without neighbours, describes it as ‘a refuge, I don’t miss anything. It’s a massive antidote to my life.’
Having been through a traumatic break-up with a long term partner at the end of last year, being able to move into a house, help to renovate it and make it his own has been a huge source of comfort and healing for him. Not only this, but the nature of country living has allowed him a much more comfortable life than his previous abode, right over the Olympia Theatre on Dame Street: ‘It’s amazing getting away from the city grind of rates and rentals. Living up here is great and it looks amazing, so people expect you have more money than you do. But really living here is half the price of anything you would rent in town. This is not convenient living and what you’re paying for in the city is convenience.’
Despite his clear emotional attachment to the building and his desire to be protective of it, Brian is also very aware of its value and power, ‘My eldest brother calls it “Wowland”,’ he explains while recounting how friends and family have come up to the house to get away from it all. Little elements like a greenhouse made entirely out of old window frames, a seat Brody constructed himself out of old stones, and a ‘fairy forest’ that sits at the back of the property all add to enchantment of the place, and one that he is keen to share with the children in his family: ‘Patrick Scott really instilled in us the idea that people should come up and share this space, but also respect it. I don’t take it for granted, I’m not some guy who doesn’t know how fortunate he has it.’
