My favourite room: Towering Success for Terry Prone
A dilapidated Martello tower may not seem like the most desirable of properties, but, as Mary O'Sullivan discovered, for communications guru Terry Prone it was her longed-for dream home. Photography by Tony Gavin
Terry in the white, light--filled kitchen, with its U-shaped island by JK Kitchens, Co Louth.
It's often said that those who have faced death at some stage in their lives are fearless. If that's the case, communicator extraordinaire Terry Prone, who survived a horrific car accident some 20 years ago, is a perfect example. She's certainly never afraid to speak her mind. That's borne out in her ballsy newspaper columns and radio and TV appearances. And also in her attitude to her looks, about which she wrote a book.
When no one in this country would admit to having had the mildest of plastic surgery or even a touch of Botox, Terry was not only bold enough to confess to several facelifts, she actually admitted to being addicted to cosmetic procedures.
More recently, she did something else few people do -- along with her husband Tom Savage and son Anton, she started a new company, the Communications Clinic, right in the middle of a recession. And she even claims it's fun. "It was loopy to start in a recession, but we found out we're really good at running a business in a recession," she enthuses. "And, you know what? I never thought I'd have so much fun again. The past two years have been like the best years before," she says, referring to the 30-odd years she spent in Carr Communications, the company she ran with Bunny Carr, the host of popular quiz show Quicksilver, and Tom, who was a priest in a former life. They sold the company four years ago.
She obviously thrives on a challenge, and her biggest yet may well have been the purchase of a dilapidated Martello tower in Portrane, Co Dublin, which she and Tom, now chairman of the RTE Authority, are renovating. It's their third home in a long, and apparently very happy, marriage. Their first home was on the northside too: a mid-terrace house in Baldoyle. After Terry's accident, the stairs became a problem, so they moved to Sheilmartin, a development overlooking the sea in Sutton. Close to Sheilmartin there was a Martello tower, and Terry hankered after it. It did come on the market, but it was impractical, with nowhere to park a car.
But the seed had been sown.
According to Terry, the Martello towers were built in 1806 -- a British admiral saw a succession of squat, round towers around the coast of Italy and thought they'd be an ideal protection against Napoleonic invasion, and so 78 were built around Britain and Ireland. They are, she says, all alike and all different, and most are owned by the State. "Tom knew it was a dream of mine to live in a Martello tower, to be so near the sea, to live in something so old. When the Portrane tower came on the market he said to the auctioneer, 'Yep, we're buying,'" Terry recalls.
So, was it wonderful? Not then, apparently. "It was really awful inside," she says, then adding, for emphasis, "spectacularly awful," and, "oh, so awful."
It was horrifically damp. The last owner had hired two guys to break out four walls in the circular tower. They took great chunks out of the walls and used them to buttress the garden in tiers. That owner also attached a garage and a boathouse and, in Terry's words, other "sticky-out bits". There was no sense of being in a circular building, and there was "a most God-awful galley kitchen". She admits it was "kind of frightening" taking it on. But, characteristically, she pronounces, "Damn it to hell, you only live once."
But Terry has vision, as has, it seems, her son/boss Anton Savage, about whom Terry speaks most fondly -- although she jokes that it's humiliating to have her son as her boss. Anton is general manager of the Communications Clinic, but Terry is now chairman, so she's probably his boss again. She credits Anton with having played a huge part in the refurbishment -- with unearthing, discovering, and working out all of the best bits about the tower.
"Anton is fantastic," Terry says. "He'd say, 'Can I come and punch a hole in the ceiling?' 'With a view to what?' I'd ask, and he'd have worked out that there must have been a winch to take cannonballs." And he'd find it, just as he also worked out and found where the gunpowder had been stored and where the cistern was -- Anton studied the subject and he discovered that some of the towers had a cistern to sustain 25 men in the event of a siege and he found such a cistern in Portrane. He also discovered the spiral staircase and researched how it could be restored.
The tower had been used purely as a summer house, but Tom and Terry moved in immediately after they bought it and lived in it full-time. "We wouldn't have started the tear-out and refurb for a year," Terry says. "We wanted to find out 'how does this thing work?'"
The local-authority conservation architects got involved, and Terry was initially wary. One assumes they're there to prevent a person doing things, but they were, she says, of huge assistance, only insisting that anything new had to look new. She also praises architects Sue Casey and Des Maguire of Hannigan Maguire Architects, who designed the renovation project, and builder Colm Magennis, who carried out the work.
After four years and a lot of heartache she has a unique home. Some parts are what you'd expect to find in a top-of-the-range, modern home -- the cosy sunroom and the contemporary, white, light-filled kitchen by JK Kitchens, Co Louth, with its U-shaped island -- but others are unique, such as the two-level circular library: you can go from one level to the other either by the spiral staircase or the lift, and you can overlook the lower level from the atrium. The staircase, lift, the banister around the atrium and the structural glass covering the cistern were all devised by Anton's friend David Sheane -- "the genius behind Formula Sheane", as Terry describes him. Anton is passionate about cars and he drives for Formula Sheane.
The mahogany bookshelves hold about 20,000 books. Terry has written 26 of them, including the recently reissued Write and Get Paid for It, a best-seller she wrote 30 years ago, which has been completely updated, taking account of new developments in technology, but in the main she collects biography, crime and history -- there's an enormous section on Hitler and the Holocaust. She's also big into the environment. "I'm pathetically environmental. I make my own briquettes," she confesses.
Other rooms include Tom and Terry's office, two bathrooms and one bedroom, and, while none is as spectacular as the libraries, each has a USP: a different, awe-inspiring view of Dublin Bay.
The restoration also involved the gardens, which have been completely restored, and are lovingly tended by Terry's neighbour Mary Linders.
So a complete facelift, inside and out. And what of her own face -- is she planning any more work? "I haven't been able to afford it. I would have a shopping list of things to be done, and top of the list is a thigh lift. But any cosmetic surgery being done these days is for the tower instead," she laughs.
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See www.communicationsclinic.ie 'Write and Get Paid for It' is published by Londubh Books, €12.99. The tower is open from 9am-1pm, Saturday and Sunday until December, and 9am-1pm daily from September 23-30. Adults €5, pensioners €1, and children free
- Mary O'Sullivan
Originally published in
