How this gem in The Burnaby, Ireland’s first planned housing estate, became home to Hollywood’s Gene Wilder (2025)

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​Late 1960s Dublin is arguably the real star of the hokey-but-charming romantic comedy Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in The Bronx. In it, Gene Wilder manfully plays the title role of Quackser, a young dreamer who collects horse manure on the capital’s streets, selling it on for a few pence and occasional fringe benefits to grateful housewives for their flower gardens.

The happy-go-lucky character lives with his family in a pokey two-up two-down somewhere in the city centre’s then-industrial heartland, and he falls in love with a wealthy American exchange student played by Margot Kidder. His family are worried about his future, as horses are about to be replaced as working transportation by mechanical vehicles.

But Wilder was not subject to Quackser’s working-class privations, particularly when it came to somewhere to live while shooting the film on location and in Ardmore Studios in Bray, Co Wicklow.

Heremon O’Farrell was only a child when the film star rocked up to his parents’ door at Knockbawn on ­Portland Road, in the affluent Burnaby estate in Greystones.

The family had just settled into their new home having moved from Rathgar, when, in a scene more in keeping with the spirit of Wilder’s later role in Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, the rising Hollywood star called by out of the blue, asking if he could rent their house for six months.

“The story goes that he was driving around with his driver and he said, ‘Oh, I would love to live in a house rather than stay in a hotel because that’s what we do all the time’. He saw the area and said ‘Yeah, I’d love to live in a house around here,’ then ‘Oh, look at that house there. That’s lovely.’

“And so the driver got out of the car and knocked on the front door. My mother answered the door, and he said who he was, and he said ‘Look, can we speak to the man of the house.’”

According to O’Farrell, Wilder came in and chatted with his father, eventually making an offer to rent the house for six months that could not be refused.

Wilder and O’Farrell’s parents cemented the matter over dinner that evening in the Gresham Hotel, and they subsequently moved to another house they owned in Bray for the duration. This ended up being three months rather than the originally agreed six, but Wilder paid regardless.

The family moved to The Burnaby in 1968 and O’Farrell was reared there along with 10 other children.

Difficult as it is to envision now, it must have been a culture shock for the genteel protestant population of Ireland’s first planned housing estate to see Patrick and Rose O’Farrell and their 11 children move into one of the Arts and Crafts-inspired homes, the first Catholic family to do so.

“It was a bit strange at first, but over time we were accepted,” O’Farrell says. “It was more of a feeling than anything else.”

Since the estate’s completion around 1910, The Burnaby had mainly attracted residents from the upper middle class protestant elite.

O’Farrell says he is too young to remember any neighbourly reaction to the appearance of Wilder but at the time, the star had only recently come to prominence in the Mel Brooks’ Oscar-winning The Producers, which went on to become a cult comedy classic, so he would have been well-recognisable at that point.

The O’Farrell’s house on Portland Road is one of the older homes on the estate. Completed in 1900 and modernised a few times since, it ­nonetheless remains true to the vision of developer Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed.

The mountaineer, writer, photographer and landowner conceived the idea for the housing scheme and named it for her famous husband Fred Burnaby, a soldier and British intelligence officer who died at the battle of Abu Klea in Egypt in 1885.

These days, Knockbawn has just under 3,360sq ft of living accommodation that includes a separate, self-contained apartment of almost 520sq ft, with its own entrance on Somerby Road. The house is on a corner site of half an acre with lots of well-established trees.

Inside, there is an entrance porch with a typical Edwardian red and white clay tiled floor, and the hallway has original plaster detailing.

There is a drawing room overlooking both the front and the side which also has original plasterwork and picture rails. There is a cast ion and tile fireplace with brass inset, and a timber mantlepiece. One of the windows has a window seat.

The second living room is also dual aspect and has original decorative plasterwork and picture rail, this time with a marble fireplace and cast iron/tile inset. There is also a home office, which also has a fireplace, with double patio doors leading out to the side garden.

The dining room has a partially vaulted ceiling and French doors out to an enclosed courtyard. It has a cast iron fireplace with marble mantlepiece and alcove shelving.

Also downstairs is a shower room and a kitchen with Aga cooker, a wine fridge, Belfast sink and black marble worktops. There is a large utility, a breakfast room and family room.

On the first floor is the main bedroom, which overlooks the garden on two sides. It has a fireplace and en suite bathroom as well as a dressing room, which was originally a fifth bedroom. There are also three other bedrooms and a family bathroom. The separate apartment has a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom.

The garden, some of which was formerly a grass tennis court, is mostly lawns, with hedging, trees, shrubbery, flowering beds and rockeries.

While it might be a cliche to say the Garden City Movement-inspired home has stood the test of time, it has also stood the test of nature itself.

“One day, a storm felled one of those huge, evergreen trees and it landed directly on the side of the house,” O’Farrell explains. “It was leaning against us for a few days and when it was removed, the only damage done was that we had to replace a pane of glass in a window.”