Shelbourne Hotel

"... The redbrick, white-wood-trim Shelbourne hotel has commanded "the best address in Dublin" from the north side of St. Stephen's Green since 1865. After a major renovation and expansion, it reopened in the fall of 2006; a new restaurant, new lounge bar, and 75 guest rooms constitute a major facelift for most iconic hotel. In 1921 the 's constitution was drafted here, in a first-floor suite. wrote her novel The Hotel about this very place."

"In 1951, ... wrote a history of the Shelbourne Hotel, which she describes as 'overhanging the ornamental landscape of trees, grass, water' of the Green, 'tall as a cliff, but more genial'. Largely dismissed by critics at the time, and ever since, The Shelbourne is much more than a history of the hotel, although it is that; it is really a history of Dublin seen through Bowen's well-polished lens. As Irish history flows around it, the Shelbourne Hotel becomes for Bowen a kind of still point, a splendid bow window through which the flux of time can be observed. While teaspoons clatter politely on fine bone china, outside there is the , the rise of nationalist politics, and the , when more than 200 members of the Irish Citizen Army, among them , took over St. Stephen's Green. The hotel's initial response to the insurrection — transferring tea to the Writing Room at the rear of the building so as to take guests out of the direct line of gunfire — 'was met with disfavour'."

"In his memoirs, recorded what he remembered, some thirty-five years after the event, of ’s actual words spoken during the that after-dinner speech at the ' dinner, held at Dublin’s Sherbourne Hotel to celebrate the inaugural season of the in 1899. Apparently, almost everybody present was drunk, including O’Grady himself when he rose to speak."

"… The hotels of the city offer a valuable insight into the people who lived and worked in Dublin, as well as those who travelled there. The Shelbourne Hotel on Stephen’s Green was perhaps the most prestigious in the city, a place where many moneyed visitors stayed and wined and dined in considerable style. The staff was truly cosmopolitan: the cooks and chambermaids were Irish, while the waiting staff comprised eight Germans, three Austrians, and one each from Bohemia and England. They all lived together in a house near the hotel until, at the outbreak of the , the German contingent was interned. In the area around the Shelbourne Hotel the fashionable elite clubs of London were replicated, most obviously in the prestigious ."

"... The hotel to which I had been directed is a respectable old edifice, much frequented by families from the country, and where the solitary traveller may likewise find society. For he may either use the "Shelburne" as a hotel or a boarding house, in which latter case he is comfortably accommodated at the very moderate daily charge of six-and-eightpence. For this charge a copious breakfast is provided for him in the coffee-room, a perpetual luncheon is likewise there spread, a plentiful dinner is ready at six o'clock; after which there is a drawing-room and a rubber of whist, with tay and coffee and cakes in plenty to satisfy the largest appetite. The hotel is majestically conducted by clerks and other officers; the landlord himself does not appear, after the honest, comfortable English fashion, but lives in a private mansion hard by, where his name may be read inscribed on a brass-plate, like that of any other private gentleman."