It stretches the definition of pied-à-terre but Mark Zuckerberg now has a pad in Ireland: Strancally castle. The Meta chief executive and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have bought the gothic-style mansion and its 178-hectare (440-acre) estate in county Waterford to use as a base during visits to Ireland. The price paid in the off-market deal is not known but the Irish Times, which first reported the sale, estimated a value between €20m (£17m) and €30m: approximately 10% of the cost of his 387ft superyacht.
The castle was built in 1830 for John Keily, a former Conservative MP, and designed on a lavish scale by the architects James and George Richard Pain, with a “brisk walk of four and a half minutes” needed to go from the dining room to the kitchen, according to the book The Houses of Ireland. Michael Alen-Buckley, a co-founder of the London-based investment firm RAB Capital, and his wife, Giancarla, a scion of the family behind the Rocco Forte Hotels group, bought the estate and renovated it in the early 2000s. We wish them and their family much happiness in this unique and blessed place.” The website of the National Built Heritage Service, an Irish state agency that protects architectural heritage, pays a barbed compliment to the castle.
The Blackwater valley contains other historic estates, including Ballynatray House, which the entrepreneur James Dyson bought in 2024. Further north, John Collison, a co-founder of the technology platform Stripe, bought Abbey Leix, an estate in County Laois, in 2021.
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