The Houses of Guinness

• An entertaining social history of the wider Guinness dynasty and some of their most famous homes, covering the whole of the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Features famed properties such as Kenwood House and Elveden Hall in England, Farmleigh and Luggala in Ireland.
• The cast of characters includes society figures, artists, fashion designers and rock musicians.
• Published to coincide with the new Netflix series ‘House of Guinness’, due in late 2025.

‘Tinniswood … [is] an erudite historian of country-house life in all its anecdote-worthy vagaries’ Financial Times

‘We are in the company of a confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly …’ Virginia Nicholson, The Times

 

An entertaining new history of the Guinness family and their homes, told by our leading historian of the country house.

In late 2025, the new Netflix epic ‘House of Guinness’, a saga of one of Europe’s most enduring dynasties, will sweep into households around the world.

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.