page_title: Desmond Guinness
section_title: Irish Georgian Society
hierarchical_section_title: Desmond Guinness / Life / Irish Georgian Society
caption_attribution_description: Castletown house was built in 1722 for ‘Speaker’ William Conolly. He was the speaker in the Irish House of Commons from 1715. The house was designed by an Italian architect Alessandro Galilei and it remains the only house in Ireland designed by him.
context_page_description: Desmond Walter Guinness was an Irish author on Georgian art and architecture, a conservationist and the co-founder of the Irish Georgian Society. He was the second son of the author and brewer Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne and his then wife, Diana Mitford.
  In 1958, he bought Leixlip Castle, Leixlip, County Kildare, Ireland, where he lived with his second wife, the former Penelope Cuthbertson, whom he married in 1984.
context_section_description: Desmond and Mariga founded the Irish Georgian Society in April 1958 to help to preserve Irish architecture of all periods. This was timely as the Irish planning laws were enacted only from 1963.
  The IGS became involved in numerous projects and started publishing quarterly bulletins.  Some early preservations or campaigns were at: Damer House (County Tipperary), The Conolly Folly (County Kildare), Mountjoy Square, Tailors' Hall and Hume Street (Dublin) and the Dromana Gateway in County Waterford.
  The IGS also held Georgian cricket matches played to the rules of 1744.
  In 1967–79 the Guinnesses bought and started to preserve Castletown House, in Celbridge, Kildare, said to be the finest Palladian house in Ireland.
caption: Castletown house
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