40 homebuilding.co.uk
WordsAlisonWall PhotograPhy Janice O’Connell
“I rebuilt a
ruined castle”
Eight-year-old Richard Good-
Stephenson, playing in the ruins of
his family’s castle in County Cork,
Ireland, had a bold dream: that one
day he would restore “the old place”
to its former glory
F
ast forward two decades, and Richard had
fulfilled another of his early dreams — to
become an airline pilot, first with the
fledgling Ryanair and then with British Airways,
which took him to Surrey.
But the original childhood dream refused to fade
— and with it came the need to earn serious money
to pay for the project. “I had to figure out a way
to earn money to restore the old place, so I started
a property business specialising in renovating old
buildings. Eventually I gave up flying so that I could
concentrate on that full-time,” he begins.
By 1998, Richard was in a position to start work
on the restoration of the castle that had been in his
family since the eighteenth century — moving his
own family into the castle in 2001. Eighty years of
abandonment following a fire in 1921 had done
their worst: Cor Castle had no roof, parts of the
building had collapsed and the whole structure was
smothered in ivy. “A sycamore tree had even set
seed in the drawing room and the crown had grown
through the roof,” Richard remembers.News