Cashel Palace Hotel

It was built as a grandiose home for an 18th-century archbishop, and later became a luxury hotel frequented by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy and Richard Burton. Now Ireland’s Cashel Palace Hotel is set to be given a new lease of life, courtesy of architecture and design firm ReardonSmith.

The architects have gained conditional planning consent to transform Cashel Palace into “a world-class country house hotel for the 21st century with 61 bedrooms and suites, a ballroom and spa, and grand function areas suitable for the most special of occasions.”

The new cloister of bedrooms wings will echo the fabric of the town and a guestroom extension to the original building will be styled as “a sensitively contemporised version of the 18th Century vernacular.”