Our History

The hotel dates to 1914 when it originally opened as a cottage, hunting lodge and guesthouse with five bedrooms, as part of the Powerscourt Estate. The house was purchased by The McCarthy family in 1919: they added bedrooms and a function room and continued to run the hotel for the next 60 years. The Patrick family acquired the hotel in 1978 and further developed the Hotel until the Stafford Investment Company purchased it in 1992. Since then, the Glenview has grown from a 42-bedroom hotel to 72 bedrooms, with an award-winning Woodlands Restaurant, extensive meeting and events suites  and a leisure club and stunning outdoor dining and 30 acres of landscaped gardens and woodlands . The Hotel has been back in current Irish family ownership since 2006.

Talk about an entourage when  Liz Taylor arrived at the hotel in the 1960s with a white Rolls-Royce complete with French chauffeur, 17 household staff, hairdressers, and tutors for their children. Taylor was firmly in situ when Richard Burton came here to film The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (in the 1960s), not least because his co-star was his former girlfriend, actress Claire Bloom. Staff remember how Taylor and Burton always dined at table no 10 in the restaurant.

Its close proximity to Ardmore Studios meant that stars like Katherine Hepburn, Ursula Andress, Kim Novak, George Peppard and James Mason, dined and stayed whilst filming such classics as Of Human Bondage, The Lion in Winter and The Blue Max.New Zealand actor Sam Neill lunched there as a young hitchhiker and popped back years later when he was filming Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls later at Ardmore. Dame Angela Lansbury, Rod Steiger and John Huston stayed there too and members of the Kennedy family stopped at the Glenview in 1968 for a private lunch on their way to Wexford to officially open the John F Kennedy Memorial Park. In the early noughties, it was team hotel for the Irish rugby squad and over the years has welcomed many national and international teams.