"Idyllic hill top hamlet" Forty years on

On June 17th 1986 an acte de vente was signed giving me ownership of what is now the Dominic Lagan Gallery. This purchase (I was thirty-four at the time) was inspired by my mother, Mary Lagan Bruce. She had noticed a small lineage ad in the Telegraph headed "idyllic hill top hamlet". So one dull, rainy, Spring afternoon in 1986 I found myself (alongside my brother Mike) viewing a broken-down barn for sale. Rejecting it without a great deal of thought (never buy a building that was not built for human beings, and then try and make it into a home). I turned around, looked back southwards, and there it was, the original farmer's house. "Is that for sale?" I asked the agent. On hearing it was, we walked down the hill and entered by the rotting front door (all the exterior wood in the building had rotted away). We looked at the two large rooms on the ground floor, one with a massive chimney, and went up the stairs. As we entered the large bedroom, two enormous bats detached themselves from one of the oak beams and flew downstairs and out the front door. The house was completely untouched by either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. No water. No electricity. No sewage. No nothing. The reason why nobody wanted the house was obvious: there was a huge crack in the exterior wall you could put your fist in. The architect I hired, Leslie Morrison, said there were two probable explanations: either the house was standing on an underground stream (in which case it could not be saved), or it was due to the subsidence common in clay soils. The roof was taken off, and the entire corner of the house demolished. The team peered into the rubble. No stream. Building started. I wasn't involved, except of course sitting in my office in St James Square, signing gigantic cheques. Worth every franc. Just imagine. I could have not turned around, just got back into the car and driven back to the airport. It's not the things that you have done that you regret. It's the things you didn't do. 17/6/2026