In The Houses of Guinness, bestselling author Adrian Tinniswood explores the histories of the legendary Guinness family – brewers, philanthropists, socialites – through their mansions and town houses. His tour opens the door to Irish palaces like Farmleigh (where the Edwardian ballroom is said to have a floor made from barrels brought from the brewery) and Luggala in the Wicklow Mountains, and to Biddesden, an exquisite William-and-Mary country house bought as a home for Bryan Guinness and his first wife Diana Mitford, and Robert Adam’s Kenwood on Hampstead Heath, which Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh saved from destruction and bequeathed to the British nation.

Unravelling the stories of more than a dozen great Guinness houses, Tinniswood reveals what life was like for a dynasty that rose from ordinary beginnings in Georgian Dublin to become one of the most powerful families in the British Isles.

Adrian Tinniswood, OBE FSA, is a true chronicler of the country houses of the UK and Ireland, having published nineteen books on social and architectural history. His many acclaimed titles include The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars’, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and The Verneys: a True Story of Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England, which was shortlisted for the BBC/Samuel Johnson Prize. Adrian Tinniswood is currently Professor of British Cultural History at the University of Buckingham. He lives in the west of Ireland with his wife Helen and their cat.