A Return to Ballyfin
A few years ago, I took my friend Stacie Flinner to Ballyfin, the historic estate in County Laois, Ireland, on an inspiration trip. I have taken her on a number of these over the years, and Ballyfin might be the best one yet. No shoot list, no wardrobe rack, no call sheet. Just two friends who get inspiration looking at beautiful things, walking around one of the most beautiful places either of us had ever seen.
It was also a trip without kids or husbands. Stacie and I are both mothers. Trips like that do not happen often, and when they do, you remember them differently than the ones with a family in tow.
With three-year-old twins, I always have anxiety leading up to a trip, and it does not really let up until I am on the airplane. Somewhere over the Atlantic I start to feel a little better, and by the time we land I am in focus mode. That shift matters more on a trip like this one, where the days are long and there is no room to be anywhere but present.
We came home from that first trip talking about Ballyfin for months. So when it came time to plan a shoot that needed somewhere genuinely special, Ballyfin was where the inspiration had always been.
What makes Ballyfin worth the trip
Ballyfin is a Regency-era house set on 614 acres of walled parkland and woodland in County Laois, built in the 1820s and restored over close to a decade before it reopened as a hotel in 2011. The scale of the restoration is hard to overstate. Hand-painted wallpapers, a marquetry floor in the entrance rotunda modeled on the Lion Court of the Alhambra, a curved glass conservatory that was taken apart and rebuilt piece by piece.
But the thing that gets me every time is not just the house. It is the land around it. Rolling countryside as far as you can see, and even though there can be other guests staying at the same time, with only around twenty rooms spread across 614 acres, you rarely see them. It is completely secluded. Completely tranquil. You feel like you have the entire estate to yourselves, which is a rare thing to feel anywhere anymore.
What it actually takes to shoot somewhere like this
People sometimes assume a shoot like this comes together on instinct once you arrive. It does not. Every look was planned before we left home. The wardrobe travels with us, packed and pre-assigned to specific moments, because there is no time to improvise once the days start.
We spent our first full day at Ballyfin scouting alone, walking the grounds and the rooms with no camera out, just deciding where each look would live. Then two full days of shooting, 9 in the morning until 8 at night, moving from room to room and location to location as the light changed.
We barely scratched the surface
Even with two full days, we did not come close to covering the estate. There is a lake, a walled garden the kitchen still cooks from, follies tucked into the woods, miles of paths through ancient trees. Two days is not enough to shoot even a fraction of it. That is not a complaint. It is the reason I already know we will be back.
The food
The food at Ballyfin earned its own headline this year. The restaurant was awarded a Michelin star, the first in the Irish Midlands. Dinner is candlelit, and everything on the plate traces back to the walled garden the kitchen has been cooking from for almost two centuries. It is the kind of meal that makes you understand why people build entire trips around a single dining room.
The project I can't show you yet
There is one more reason this trip mattered. We shot a special collaboration at Ballyfin that is launching in October, something with shoes and accessories that I am not able to give you a real look at yet. I can tell you it was designed with exactly this kind of setting in mind, and that shooting it somewhere this beautiful only confirmed we got the concept right. More soon.
A few looks from the trip
I hope you love the pictures as much as I loved being back. There is more coming from this trip in October, and I cannot wait to finally show you what it was really for.