Westmeath-born businessman Desmond Keogh is the first Irishman to become president of the Irish Georgian Society in the United States.

Now based in Florida, he took up the office in April. Keogh grew up on the 120-hectare (300-acre) Ballinakill Farm on Lough Derravaragh, Co Westmeath, and is passionate about Irish country houses. He bought Oakley Park House, outside Kells, in 2023.

“I had been searching for a house in Ireland for three years. I wanted somewhere about half an hour from my mother’s and a reasonable distance from Dublin Airport,” he says.

We are sitting in the drawingroom of the late Georgian country house that his wife, Cristina, an interior designer, has transformed into a comfortable, airy space, decorated with historical paintings, urns, Georgian furniture and a large elk head facing the fireplace.

“I like moving. I like houses. It’s my comfort zone. It’s really fun,” she says. The couple have five children, aged 11 to 26.

In the diningroom across the corridor, the Keoghs have installed a large, oval-shaped dining table with chairs upholstered in French fabric and practical, modern, American side cabinets. The kitchen at the back of the house has modern, fitted cabinets, the original Aga cooker and a sizeable table to accommodate visiting family and friends.

“I like mixing everything up, being practical with a bit of character. I don’t want the house to look like a museum. I want people to come and use it, and for it to be exciting, comfortable, with nothing too precious,” she says. The five bedrooms upstairs have yet to be given a makeover.

Keogh has an eight-phase restoration plan for the late Georgian country house estate. “We did emergency work on the roof and the valleys. The exterior wasn’t in bad shape,” he says, as he shows us where he has uncovered the dilapidated basement, completely abandoned by previous owners who also knocked down a much larger older house to the rear of Oakley Park House.

Keogh’s long-term plans include work on the main house and the basement, restoring the steward’s and coachman’s houses and other buildings in the extensive farmyard, replanting and repairing the walled garden and another sunken garden on the estate.

House tours

He regularly returns to Ireland to join the Irish Georgian Society spring and autumn tours of country houses across the 32 counties.

“We bring 14 to 16 people on these tours from America. We stay at the private houses, have lunch and dinner with the owners,” he says. Keeping numbers low is key to giving the visitors an up-close-and-personal sense of life in the 18th- and 19th-century country properties.

Keogh expresses astonishment at the number of Irish country houses that remain intact, considering that almost 300 were burned down between 1919 and 1923 and many more were demolished or allowed to go to ruin in the mid-20th century.

Although interested in architecture and drawing from a young age, he first got involved with the Irish Georgian Society in the US in the 1990s. “Now we have events at the Beach Club in Palm Beach [Florida], where I am a member, and dinners in New York, Boston and Chicago in the autumn,” he says.

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During his four-year tenure as president, he would like to expand the presence of Irish Georgian Society scholarship programmes to other US cities with strong Irish-American connections, such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, Dallas and San Francisco.

“I’m looking for universities with good architecture and history of art programmes, so that we can bring Irish students there, build relationships and open chapters of the Irish Georgian Society in these cities,” he says.

Connections

A member of the US Republican Party since he “landed” in the US, Keogh has many connections and on his recent visit to Ireland, popped in to see the current US ambassador, Edward Walsh.

He was also friendly with the late US businessman Fred Krehbiel, who bought and restored the five-star Ballyfin Demesne hotel in Co Laois. The hotel is now run by his sons, Jay and Liam Krehbiel. Tommy Quick, president of the Ireland Funds charitable network, is another Palm Beach resident with whom Keogh associates.

Keogh says American business people buy properties in Ireland because “they love everything about Ireland”. “They also feel that they get incredible value and enjoy fixing them up and putting money into restoring them.”

The Irish Georgian Society in the US counts several wealthy business people among its members, including the late Wall Street financier Beth Dater Jennings, whose donations to restoration projects in Ireland have been significant.

These included a donation of €1.5 million towards the mid-2010s restoration of the City Assembly House, the Irish Georgian Society headquarters in on South William Street in Dublin 2, and, more recently, support for restoration works on the Sirius Arts Centre, the former yacht club building in Cobh, Co Cork.

The Irish Georgian Society in the US is currently considering which new projects to fund. “I’ve looked at five projects, from Tipperary to Cork to Waterford, that I’ll bring back to the board,” says Keogh.

Keen to promote the Irish Georgian Society at home and in the US, he says, “people think the Irish Georgian Society is elite and stuffy but it’s a really fun and interesting organisation to be in. It’s not expensive to join and you don’t have to own a Georgian house to enjoy the parties and tours.”

Professional success

His own back story is an example of how some Irish people successfully built their lives from scratch in the US. While studying at Multyfarnham Agricultural College in the 1980s, Keogh spent two summers in the US playing Gaelic football. While there, an encounter with an American businessman who invited him to his winter home in Palm Beach changed the trajectory of his life.

“I just loved the architecture and the climate. I thought, when I finish college, I’m going to go back there and have a business there,” he recalls. And, so he did.

Working first for a Maryland businessman who imported stone and tiles from Europe for the neoclassical mansions of south Florida, Keogh fell on his feet. “I had £300, no green card, no credit card but I started working for Stuart Cronin and I stayed with him and his Roscommon-born wife and eight months later, I bought my first house,” he says.

Designing and selling glass tables with a marble base as a side business, he then began restoring marble for wealthy homeowners in south Florida and beyond. This led to his current businesses, Haifa Limestone and Haifa General Contracting, which deal with high-end clients throughout the US.

“I import stone to the US from 21 different countries. We do all the architectural drawings, the global sourcing, the fabrication, the installation and the finishing work, so the buck stops with us,” he says. He named his business Haifa, after the Israeli city, because he had a lot of Jewish clients.

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When he is in Ireland, Keogh loves nothing more than joining the Meath hunt and he also hunts with the Palm Beach hounds in Florida. “I grew up with horses and I now host the Meath hunt in the first week in January,” he says, proudly.

He is also avidly researching the history of Oakley Park House, keen to explore every angle that presents itself.

He recounts how when he was under contract to purchase the property in 2023, he began looking into the Bomford family, the original owners of the property. And he was chuffed to find one of the last surviving family members, Jim Bomford, retired in Longwood, Florida.

“He had the [American] civil war medals, gun and sword of his great, great-grandfather Augustus Bomford, who was disinherited from Oakley Park because he fell in love with a Catholic girl and went to New York in 1861,” Keogh says.

As the 84-year-old retiree didn’t have any children, he gave the military memorabilia to Keogh, who now has them displayed in the front hall of Oakley Park House.