Ballyfin Demesne hotel in Co Laois In Ireland where Kim Kardashian and Kanye West Honeymooned

The plush hotel where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian honeymooned has been named as one of the world’s top hideaways thanks to its Downton Abbey-style welcome for guests.
Ballyfin Demesne in Laois has been named as the top hotel in the world to make you feel special in the Hideaway Report’s 2018 Members’ Choice Award.
This 19th-century manor house is nothing if not grand. Gilded plaster ceilings, marble columns and inlaid mosaic tiles decorate the six reception rooms; an 80-foot-long library contains 5,000 volumes; and museum-quality art and antiques adorn every public space.
“All this, with only 20 bedrooms, means that Ballyfin may be elegant and formal, but guests also feel right at home.”
They are thought to have chosen the super exclusive Laois estate due to its Palace of Versailles-style interiors boasting a chandelier once owned by Napoleon’s sister.
Ballyfin looks as though it hasn’t been touched in 200 years. This is the classic Regency mansion - enormous in size, with adjacent stable buildings and various outhouses; set above a fishing lake; enormous walled gardens; elegant ornate conservatory to the rear; superb interiors with marbling, coving, tiling, commissioned portraits… But that’s not the full story.
It began as the house of a grandee some centuries ago - the spoils of the War of the Three Kingdoms. In 1820, the uber-wealthy Coote family transformed it into the mansion more-or-less as it is today, complete with enormous man-made lake.
For most of the 20th century, it was a boarding school run by the Patrician Brothers, before falling into a state of semi-dereliction, until a man with perhaps even more sense and taste than money (American electronics billionaire Fred Krehbiel) took it over and painstakingly re-awakened it to its current state of unparalleled splendor.