Room for a Big Fella: How this Cork hotel refurbished the historic room Michael Collins spent his last night in

“It was the first time in the history of the hotel it was closed for a substantial amount of time,” Allen says, “and you’re walking around an empty building thinking about what went on there.”

It must have been quite a contrast for him to the typical bustle of hotel life, hearing echoes around vaulted ceilings. 

Often, though, it’s in quiet times inspiration strikes, perhaps influenced by the Georgian and Victorian grandeur of this Mrs Astor among South Mall’s buildings.

But what developed is a collaboration between Allen, his brother John, Luke Hickson of Meitheal Architects, and the Imperial’s general manager Bastien Peyraud.

“We wanted to bring the room back to a sense of what it was like but we also wanted it to be a unique, bespoke project,” Allen says.

Now accomplished and the hotel back to pre-Covid bustle, the scene is set on arrival by a sculpture of the Big Fella on loan from Dómhnal Slattery, and a portrait of the local hero looming large in the foyer, commissioned from artist Mick O’Dea.

Climbing the grand staircase, passing walls of saturated teal, and entering the suite everything is suddenly taken down a few notches tonally to give a sense of fading, low-key grandeur with calming blue and green combinations, velvet finishes on upholstery and tactile flocked wall panels, and a littering of antiques.

Gone is the signature wall-to-wall hotel room carpeting, and in its place a dark wooden parquet floor softened by an outsize rug.

Centre, sits a handsome four-poster bed with pleated velvet canopy overhead to gaze at while you drift off between gleaming crisp white sheets.

To get the look right, Allen says, “We looked at the fabric colours of the time and replicated them and researched the type of furniture that would have been in a room like this. We had a full year of antique shopping.”

And a successful one at that it appears.

Star finds include a pair of antique mahogany tallboys which stand on either side of the bed, marble-topped with fringed reading lamps.

They’re typical of the late Edwardian, new art deco look that was just starting to take off in interiors in the early 1920s.

A pair of paintings with pastoral scenes from the Flynn family’s art collection hangs just inside the door. Are they a nod to the Big Fella’s childhood on his family farm?

MORE emphatic nods, though, are to the 200-year-old hotel’s past which straddles the late Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian periods, and influence which might easily have overwhelmed a guest had a heavier design touch been applied, especially as it’s not the largest of rooms, having lost a corner to the all-important ensuite bathroom.

But this is where you’ll find the value in recruiting a design professional for methodical space planning, balance and harmony.

In this case Meitheal Architects and director Luke Hickson who has been working with the Imperial Hotel for 15 years.

“We were doing work on other rooms when we were asked to do this,” Luke says. “We knew we needed a strong design for the suite, something characterful.”

But how exactly was this achieved without it turning into a pastiche, while incorporating the day-to-day modern necessities and honouring the past connection with Michael Collins?

“There was a weight of expectation,” Luke explains. “It’s a fine line to navigate being authentic to the time and trying to get in the mod-cons.

“One of the tricky things was integrating the television.”

He describes the finished room as something that might have been created for someone of Michael Collins’ stature.

“Had it been done in England it would have had a sense of royal,” he says, “but at the time in Ireland there was a modesty in the way we did things so the dichotomy of the project was that you need to balance old and new. Purists might have a stab at some of the details but I’m really delighted with the ways it’s turned out.”