To the manor born

John and Louise Mathers’ beautiful Georgian home near Magheralin in County Down was able to rise above some formidable opposition at this year’s LCN Awards gala evening in June to claim the brand new title of Guesthouse of the Year…

This is the first year that LCN has offered the Guesthouse category at the awards at the response was overwhelming, with some of Northern Ireland’s best-known and most luxurious B&B’s competing for honours.

In the end, John and Louise claimed the title for Newforge House – the wonderful family home which the couple finished converting into a high end B&B just over eight years ago. In the process, they consigned a batch of very worthy fellow-competitors – including Holywood’s Rayanne House and Laurel Villa, the poetry-themed getaway in Magherafelt – to runner-up slots.

Speaking to LCN after collecting his award, John Mathers said he was very surprised to have come out on top:

“We are a small guest house and awards like this are fantastic for us, they’re a way of getting our brand and our name out there and an invaluable way of getting some more recognition,” he added. “We love what we do, we work hard at it and it’s great that people see that.”

John’s family has lived in Newforge House for six generations. Built in 1785, the house is located on a 55-acre site that it once shared with the Magheralin hem stitching factory. That venture finally closed its doors in 1929 following the Wall Street Crash, but many of the old buildings and one of its chimneys are still preserved and accessible at the rear of the property.

According to John, business over the last year or so has been very good, although there has been some decline in the number of visitors coming from their key market in the south of Ireland – a development which he attributes to the strong pound and the unfavourable lack of parity in VAT rates between the two jurisdictions.

“We’ve just been really focused on the business,” added John. “With an old house like this, you have to really stay on top of things. We re-did the windows this year. They are Georgian sash windows. We stripped them down, patched any old wood and completely re-painted them, it’s been the biggest project that we’ve undertaken in the last couple of years.”

The couple have also just replaced their oil-fired heating system in the house with a wood pellet boiler, which now provides all of their hot water and heating requirements.

Newforge House itself offers six individually-tailored, en suite bedrooms, each of them called after the maiden names of the Mathers family. And although the property sells itself on the authenticity of the country house experience it offers, guests still have access to all the modern conveniences, including flat-screen televisions, telephones and wi-fi.

The guesthouse sits a discreet distance from the road, surrounded by significant gardens that are tended by John’s father, Robert. He lives in a renovated home at the rear of the property with his wife, Annamarie. The couple moved into the house more than a decade ago, just before John launched his renovations programme in the main dwelling.

“We had to spend a very significant amount to renovate the place,” John recalls. “It had to be re-wired and heating had to be put in. There was lots of legislation that had to be complied with, everything had to be fireproofed, we had to have fire doors throughout and there were other restrictions relating to its listed status…the whole idea was to hang on to the integrity of the old building and to avoid destroying the fabric of the place.”

Working with John on the project was Lawrence Johnston – an architect from Belfast practice, Leighton Johnston Associates, who has a lot of experience of working with listed buildings – and John McCline and Son, a building form from Dundrum.

But John himself was also deeply involved in many aspects of the complex scheme to renew the old manor house. It took two years to complete the refurbishment work, including extensive redecoration. John recalls that while the house was in reasonable repair before the work began, as the layers were stripped back, many unforeseen problems were discovered. The ground floor joists, for example, were rotten beyond repair and had to be completely replaced.

“It was a long, slow process, but I always knew that the house would look fantastic,” says John. “Every little thing took time though, such as the cornicing in the downstairs drawing room. There were so many layers of paint that it took me a month just to do that one room. It was my own naivety perhaps, but once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.”

After leaving university, John had planned to open his own restaurant and he trained as a chef, working in a variety of hotels and for Roisin Hendron and Simon Dougan in their Yellow Door restaurant in Guilford.

At the age of 23, however, John was diagnosed with Crone’s Disease and he spent much time in hospital over the next 18 months. The illness led to a re-evaluation of his plans and John soon realised that his dream of opening his own restaurant was unlikely to happen, at least in its original form. That’s when the idea of opening a boutique guesthouse experience in the family home first occurred to him. It seemed like a versatile and scalable solution that would provide him with the perfect outlet for his culinary aspirations.

Not surprisingly, then, food is a large part of the offering at Newforge. And while John is the chef, he does have help from wife, Lousie, who, in addition to looking after the couple’s two children – Theo (6) and Mia (5) –does all the baking for the afternoon teas and desserts in the evening.

Going forward, John says that he and Louise are focused on making sure they maintain very high standards at Newforge:

“We also know that we need to always find a balance between work and spending time with our family,” he adds.

There are two other full-time members of staff at the guesthouse and four part-time employees.

For some time, John and Louise have toyed with the idea of adding some more bedrooms at the rear of the house, but John – who says that he’s cautious by nature – doesn’t want to rush into any new projects:

“I don’t want to over-stretch myself,” he says.

He doesn’t anticipate any great change in the nature of Newforge House itself in the near future and says that for now, it will continue to focus on food, quality and “old-fashioned hospitality”.