Hats Off! To The Hat Maker
The Hat Maker Hotel, Dungarvan
Dungarvan’s The Hat Maker is a beauty.
Every design element in this centre-of-the-town boutique hotel has been utilised to make you smile. Everything is pleasing, both to the eye and to your sense of well-being. The Hat Maker is a lovely place to be. It’s understated, it’s gracious. It feels warm as a good hat.
It’s the place that makes you think about just how much good design can achieve. The Hat Maker feels luxurious, but manages this without resorting to the luxury baubles of the glam hotels. It is tactile, thanks to well-chosen furniture, well-chosen colours, well-chosen choices.
Everything is in its right place, which is traditionally where Irish hotels get things wrong, up-ending the feeling of feng shui by shoving a good piece of furniture into exactly the wrong place.
Rebecca Queally and her designer, Ann Kirby, have used retro touches, but here they work to make the spaces feel ageless. They use harlequinesque diamond patterns a lot – Harry Styles would feel right at home! – but then for the bar and breakfast area they have resorted to classic Madrid style, giving the room the atmosphere of a tapas bar or a vermuteria, with lined banquettes, off-set tiling, marble-topped tables and fin-de-siecle lighting.
Above all, the success of the rooms shows that Rebecca and Ann had fun doing the design, and weren’t just driven by a cost-per-square-metre metric. The individuality makes The Hat Maker feel iconoclastic, one of those all-too-rare design icons which are rare as hen’s teeth in Ireland.
David Burke and his team in the bar rustle up splendid cheese and charcuterie boards and good cocktails, with wines from Colm McCan at Le Caveau. The breakfast preparations are especially fine, so do not miss the excellent overnight oats and the granola parfait. Coffee is Treehouse, roasted by the Badger & Dodo team in Fermoy, whilst the superb breads and pastries come from the top-rated Dun Bakery, just across the street, and simply could not be better.
The French use the term “Chapeau!” to say “Well done.” It comes from the term “chapeau bas”, which means to tip the hat – the chapeau – to say “Hats off!”. The Hat Maker deserves that “Chapeau!”
The Waterford Festival of Food Dungarvan takes place 24th - 26th April 2026. It’s Ireland’s longest-running food festival, and it is pretty well guaranteed to have fine weather and fun. More details here.
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