Thomas and Kearns Deane with Richard Notter
Dromore Castle, Co. Kerry
c.1830
95/66
Dromore Castle was designed by Thomas and Kearns Deane with Richard Notter, for Rev. Denis Mahony, and built between 1831 and 1838.
Thomas Deane was born in Cork in 1792. Following the death of his father in 1806, he helped his formidable mother run the family building business. In 1811 he won his first architectural competition with a design for the Commercial Buildings on the South Mall, Cork, completed in 1813. He received a knighthood in 1830. Building contracts remained an important source of income until the mid 1840s, after which he appears to have operated exclusively as an architect, occasionally in partnership with his brother Kearns and brother-in-law Richard Notter. In 1845 he engaged Benjamin Woodward as his assistant and in 1851 he took Woodward and Thomas Newenham Deane, his son, into partnership. The firm grew into one of the most successful architectural practices in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century.
This model, which slightly predates the construction of the house itself, shows it more or less as built. It is highly unusual because of its large size. Despite lacking a roof, windows and internal floors, the model nonetheless conveys forcefully the design intent of the architects, an intent which yielded – as the model suggests – a building exuding what the architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones characterised as ‘a certain grimness’.
