Palatial pads

Beauty combines with practicality at the world’s most luxurious stable yards. Emily Bevan discovers the options – if you have a blank cheque

- Emily Bevan

IF money was no object and you could build the stable yard of your dreams, what would it look like? Would it include indoor walkways, a heated tack room and memory foam flooring, or boast a clock tower and weather vane? We look into some of the world’s most luxurious yards and see what options are available.

A traditional stable block will be easier to pass through planning but American barns are the way forward if you want everything under one roof. These days that doesn’t have to mean just your stables and tack room – indoor schools can be included in this too, like at Cian O’Connor’s Karlswood Stables.

At the Irish showjumper’s palatial pad in Co Meath, each horse has its own shower and heat lamp, the feed room looks like a kitchen – all feed is out of sight, stored in pull-out deep drawers – while the tack room resembles a Premier League changing room. The indoor sand arena, which can be accessed via an undercover walkway from the stables, uses an underground computerised ebb-and-flow water system to regulate the surface while outside there’s an 80x100m sand arena and an immaculately manicured grass jumping field.

Polo player Nacho Figueras laid turf on the roof of his stables near Buenos Aires, creating a grassy field for his horses to graze as well as helping the 180m-long building to blend into the landscape. The building, which houses 44 stables, comprises two blocks with freestanding walls.

A large shallow pool for horses to drink from is one feature of Merricks Stables near Melbourne, Australia, which was designed by Seth Stein Architects and Watson Architecture+Design. The six-stable building, which is built-in crescent form, boasts a curved roof and three-metre-high rear wall made from rammed earth, and looks out over a semicircular paddock and manège.