Estate of Play

MARTYN LAWRENCE BULLARD revives a romantic Georgian country home in Ireland, deploying grand artistry, craft, and levity in the footprint of local traditions

- SOPHIE DONELSON

Who needs a fantasy project when your bread-and-butter work is building dream houses for the Hollywood elite? Martyn Lawrence Bullard's old to-do lists contain gems like these: Source and import carved Rajasthani walls for Cher's bedroom in her Malibu villa; install two dozen custom-colored disco balls in RuPaul's salon; educate Kourtney Kardashian on the finer points of midcentury-style furnishings before she impulse-shops IstDibs. But a boy can dream, can't he? And this one dreams of a grand country house that needs lots and lots of work.

With his longtime East Coast clients, the L.A. decorator has spent the last few years upgrading one such home, Capard House, and it reawakened a spark he's had  since he was an entrepreneurial teen peddling antiques and bric-a-brac in London's Greenwich Market. Not far from Dublin the estate overlooks the ancient Slieve Bloom Mountains from its 200-acre spread of meadows and landscaping. A gravel driveway wends around chess-piece topiaries and hugs a reflecting pond and a diminutive temple, a Greek Revival folly. And high on the land, capturing the views, sits a 1790s Georgian country house, its handsome limestone facade in terrific condition, says Bullard; "the only disturbance to the majesty of its architecture is the pockmarks of shelling from rebels in a 1916 uprising."