Chris de Burgh’s hit song The Lady in Red (1986) had been on the airwaves for nearly a decade when he began to contemplate moving into a bigger house. His family had lived in Dalkey, a seaside suburb of Dublin, and when they decided to move, de Burgh began to scour the surrounding area looking for suitable properties.
He soon came across a Georgian mansion called Bushey Park, set about 13 miles from the center of Dublin. Its owners had lived there for more than 30 years and, he says, “had lived in some style but had also reached the point where they wanted to sell. They said they would sell it to me and notify me when they were ready [to do so].”
A short time later, while de Burgh was on tour, he discovered that the family had neglected the promise and put the home up for sale without notifying him.
Through a lawyer, de Burgh managed to buy the place, anyway. “And then my wife and I spent seven years restoring it,” he says. “We were involved in every aspect of it.”
Thirty years later, de Burgh is now parting with the 23,158-square-foot, eight-bedroom home, listing it with Ireland Sotheby’s International Realty for €12.5 million ($14 million).
“There’s no financial need,” he says. “I don’t have to sell this place. I just think it’s too big for two people.”
Rack and Ruin
De Burgh had spent much of his childhood in a 12th century Irish castle his parents ran as a hotel. “My grandfather bought this place with a 170-acre farm,” de Burgh says. “So I was really brought up as a farming boy and a hotelier, which I suppose is unusual.” (The castle is still in the family—during this interview, De Burgh was speaking on the phone from the castle’s banquet hall, where he could see his family’s heraldic crest mounted on the wall.)
The man who wrote "Lady in Red" is selling a $14 million estate https://t.co/jtMvEgWqy2
— Bloomberg Pursuits (@luxury) June 5, 2019
Because of his familiarity with very large, very old houses, de Burgh keenly understood that “a lot of these homes were going to rack and ruin because they’re expensive to upkeep and can’t be heated,” he says. “I used to go to a lot of these houses and see their old owners hunched around fires trying to keep warm.”
As a result, when he bought Bushey Park, he resolved to retrofit his new eight-bedroom house in such a way that he’d never have to shiver in his own living room.