Guinness family offers Farmleigh mansion by Phoenix Park for sale

The Guinness family is to sell its seat in Ireland, a mansion with up to 40 acres of land on the edge of the Phoenix Park in Castleknock, Co Dublin.

Farmleigh is built of Portland stone and is expected to make between £10 and £15 million.

The Georgian/Victorian mansion has been the family seat in Ireland since it was built in 1881. The other Guinness mansions in Ireland once included Iveagh House, which was donated to the State in the 1930s, and Ashford Castle, now a five-star hotel in Co Mayo.

It is believed to have been used infrequently by the family since the death in 1992 of the third Earl of Iveagh, Benjamin Guinness. The house is now being sold by his son, Edward Guinness, the fourth Earl, who will continue to farm most of the land around it. He lives mainly in England but also owns Mount Hybla, a smaller period house on the opposite side of White's Road.

The sale of the mansion is due to be announced this morning by Hamilton Osborne King.

Market sources suggested last night that the Government might be interested in acquiring the house, either for entertaining foreign guests or as a residence for a future Taoiseach. The house might also appeal to the British Foreign Office, which is looking for an official residence for its ambassador following the recent sale of Glencairn in Sandyford.

For the purposes of Benjamin's will, Farmleigh was valued in 1992 at £800,000 by a Dublin estate agent, who reported that the building, with the exception of the basement, "has been well maintained and is generally in excellent decorative order."

The house stands three storeys over basement with timber and stone floors and has 24 bedrooms, not including those for staff. It has several stunning reception rooms, including an oak-panelled dining room, a two-storey library with similar panelling, and a huge entrance hall with Corinthian columns.

The house was first used by Edward Cecil Guinness, the then owner of the brewery, who shortly afterwards became the first Earl of Iveagh. The house had been built a short time previously but was substantially remodelled by Guinness.

It was the family's principal home in Ireland thereafter but was unoccupied for long periods when they effectively moved to England and their Elveden Estate in Suffolk at the end of the last century.

The third Lord Iveagh, Benjamin Guinness, moved his residence back to Farmleigh in the 1970s in protest at "intolerable" tax rates in Britain.