Film director John Huston’s former Georgian retreat in Co Galway

Address: St Clerans Manor, St Clerans, Craughwell, Co Galway

Price: €4,500,000

Agent: Savills

It is more than 50 years since film director John Huston sold St Clerans, a Georgian house on 115 acres in east Galway, and yet the Hollywood glamour that he brought to this corner of the west of Ireland is what garners attention every time it is sold. And it has changed hands a number of times since he sold it in 1973.

Other owners have included property developer Joe McGowan and US TV chatshow host and media mogul Merv Griffin, who turned it into a five-star hotel after buying it in 1997 for £2 million. St Clerans, built by the Burke family around 1784 and originally known as Issercleran, went back on the market after Griffin’s death in 2007 with an asking price of €3.7 million.

Enda and the late Ian Quinn, founder of Galway medical devices firm Creganna, bought St Clerans in 2012 for €1,258,218 in 2012, according to the Property Price Register. (This sum was for the house on an acre and doesn’t include the land value.)

Griffin had spent €5 million refurbishing the Georgian house as a luxury hotel, but the Quinns turned it back into a private home and spent a lot of money refurbishing and modernising the house and estate. This included giving the house an energy efficiency upgrade, double glazing most of the windows and restoring the 17th-century Sarsfield Bridge, over which Patrick Sarsfield is thought to have travelled in July 1691 after defeat at the Battle of Aughrim nearby.

St Clerans Manor, in Craughwell, Co Galway, an eight-bedroom, 10-bathroom 1,174sq m (12,637sq ft) Georgian house on 115 acres of parkland and woodland is now for sale for €4.5 million through Savills.

No matter who buys it, it’s likely St Clerans will long be associated with the Huston era: paintings of many of the famous people who visited after Huston bought St Clerans in the early 1950s still hang on its walls. Visitors included Peter O’Toole, Arthur Miller (but not his third wife, Marilyn Monroe), Jean Paul Sartre, John Steinbeck, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. A separate octagonal stone building is still called the Anjelica suite, after his daughter Anjelica Huston, who spent much of her childhood at St Clerans with her brother Tony and sister Allegra.

A Burke family house, St Clerans was built around 1784 when an ancestral family castle nearby was abandoned, then expanded in 1807 to architect Richard Morrison’s design. Robert O’Hara Burke – who co-led the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition across Australia – was born here in 1821. Another member of the Burke family, Anne deVere Cole, was the wife of UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain.

Huston reportedly described his Georgian house as “one of the most beautiful in all Ireland”. It appears to retain many of the features of the house as it was after being refurbished by Huston’s then wife – his fourth – Ricki Soma: the black marble entrance hallway is still there, and the dramatic sunburst light fitting in the drawingroom. Accommodation is arranged over three levels. In 2014 a lift to all three floors was added towards the back of the house.

The ground floor of the main house consists of a drawingroom and diningroom off the entrance hall and a livingroom, kitchen and an en-suite bedroom off an inner hall dominated by a cantilevered staircase. The kitchen was converted back from a commercial kitchen in 2013 is now a large, bright space with two tall bay windows. There’s also a utility room.

Entrance hall Drawingroom Diningroom Kitchen Kitchen Bedroom Bedroom

There are four en suite bedrooms on the first floor. The main bedroom occupies one wing of the house; called the Griffin suite, it has his-and-hers dressingrooms and built-in wooden wardrobes. There’s also a study on the first floor. There are three more en-suite bedrooms on the lower ground garden-level floor as well as a wine cellar, gym and a fully equipped commercial kitchen.

The Anjelica suite, a separate stone lodge, accommodates a very large bedroom and a one-bedroom cottage at the entrance to the estate. It has been completely refurbished in a contemporary style, with an open-plan livingroom/diningroom/kitchen, a bedroom, triple-glazed windows and underfloor heating.

As a protected structure, St Clerans is Ber exempt, but an energy efficiency upgrade of the main house included installing a Fröling wood chip boiler and a Eurotech hydrothermal heating system.

The 115-acre estate consists of parkland, woodland and farmland. Landscaped gardens surround the house and the estate has 1km of private frontage along the Dunkellin river and behind the house, a weir. There are a number of traditional stone outbuildings as well as farm buildings on the estate. Savills brochure says that the estate offers potential for both nature conservation and ecological diversification, with a mosaic of habitats with a rich variety of flora and fauna.

The Anjelica Suite Refurbished cottage on the estate Refurbished cottage on the estate The grounds The grounds St Clerans Manor