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In Ireland, a country with an embarrassment of architectural riches, a little-known house called Luggala—the name is pronounced something like “Lugga-ler”—stands out as an especially picturesque piece of real estate. Accented by arched windows and storybook crenellation, the snow-white 18th-century folly is arguably Ireland’s most romantic dwelling—set in a valley, embowered by woodland, it overlooks a glittering lake. But as an unexpectedly moving new book explains, Luggala is much more.

Written by Robert O’Byrne, Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House (Cico Books, $45) tells the absorbing tale of a building once called “the most decorative honey pot in Ireland.” Despite the lush panoply of photographs recording shadowed pastel corridors, polychrome Pugin wallpaper, and beflowered bedrooms—David Mlinaric, grand homme of British decoration, had a hand in the splendor—Luggala Days is no mere upstairs-downstairs chronicle. Instead, O’Byrne treats the house like a three-dimensional novel, mining centuries of gossip, scandal, and tragedy, as well as family albums, guest books, letters, and diaries, to create a 256-page volume that is as satisfying as a pint of the stout that fueled the family of Luggala’s fortune.

Especially hair-raising moments occurred during the tenure of thrice-married Guinness-beer heiress Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne (1910–95), one of a trio of golden-haired sisters whose antics blazed across much of the 20th century. To borrow a comment made by British tastemaker Nancy Lancaster about one of her own aunts, the arrestingly beautiful Lady Oranmore had “a heart like a hotel,” and her Irish estate, which had been a wedding gift from her father in 1937, percolated with intrigue—emotional, social, sexual, and financial—for nearly six decades.

The plot twists of Luggala Days are infernal, and O’Byrne records them with relish. Custody battles, drunken rows, passionate affairs, a fatal car crash, and a husband with a mysterious past fill the pages. Spirited imbibing leads to tumbles down Luggala’s grand staircase, and disasters are handled with astonishing aplomb. When Luggala was gutted by fire in 1956—it was quickly restored—the butler calmly served coffee on the lawn as Lady Oranmore, clad in a nightgown and a mink coat, watched the flames dance.

The house’s hospitableness was infamous. Friends such as the Rolling Stones, Anjelica Huston (she grew up at the next-door estate of her father, John Huston), Lucian Freud, and Bono of U2 were engulfed by extravagant hospitality that one visitor called “exultant, exuberant chaos,” and then staggered home somewhat the worse for wear. As O’Byrne writes, “Guests were invited for drinks or dinner, only to emerge several days later blinking at the harsh light of the ordinary world, aware that during that lost period of time they had enjoyed themselves immensely without necessarily being clear about the details of how or why, or even with whom.”

O’Byrne’s galloping narrative and James Fennell’s lush photography produce a delectable hangover of their own. (The book’s introduction is written by Luggala’s chatelain, the Honorable Garech Browne, one of Lady Oranmore’s seven children, who is an admired promoter of traditional Irish music and, as the book illustrates, a sartorial adventurer with a taste for thrillingly clashing patterns and colors.) Their work also engenders a desire that Luggala Days will serve as a template for country-house books of the future, wherein a demesne’s private dramas are explored as thoroughly and unashamedly as its public glories.

Click here to see some of Luggala’s extraordinary interiors featured in the book.