#Meet the accidental king and queen of Ireland’s legendary 5-star castle

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Michael Smith and Laura Jamieson regally live all by their lonesome inside Ireland’s Ashford Castle.
Ashford Castle

At 800 years old, the five-star Ashford Castle hotel in County Mayo, Ireland, has been visited by the likes of Brad Pitt, Barbra Streisand and James Bond himself, Pierce Brosnan, who held his wedding reception on the property in 2001.

But the hotel’s current residents have the most exclusive experience of all.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, employees Laura Jamieson, 23, a senior guest executive, and Michael Smith, 28, the property’s estate manager, are the property’s sole inhabitants. They’re the caretakers of its luxurious 83 bedrooms and amenities including a wine cellar, spa, tea house and cinema. It sits on 350 acres of wooded estate on the shores of Lough Corrib, Ireland’s second-largest lake.

“We feel incredibly proud and lucky to have been trusted with the important job of custodians,” Jamieson tells The Post. Tasks include vacuuming and dusting, fielding guest inquiries and bookings in advance of the July 20 reopening and flushing the manor’s daunting 160 toilets to keep the plumbing in order. That chore actually takes a few hours, but they’ve figured out a trick. “We work as a team and that helps to speed up the process,” says Jamieson.

The couple met while working at Ashford and have been together a year-and-a-half, and have likened their experience to a reality show that no one is watching. While their regular bedroom is a five-minute drive away in the city of Cross, their new one, in the Victorian wing of the castle, is something out of a fairy tale.

“It has the most stunning view out over Lough Corrib,” says Jamieson. “The room has high ceilings, a working fireplace and silk on the walls. There is ample wardrobe space, which is most definitely something we will miss when the time comes to move out.”

In their downtime Jamieson and Smith go for walks on the estate and visit various animal friends, taking treats to the horses at the Ashford stables and checking in with the falconry school, which houses hawks, falcons and a European eagle owl named Dingle. “They have 38 birds in total and the whole vicinity is essentially a 5-star luxury hotel for birds.”

And in their explorations of the hotel, they’ve found favorite spots, like the billiards room, with leather-clad armchairs and adjoining cigar terrace, and the elegant Connaught Room, where afternoon tea is served with views of manicured gardens and the lake. “In the morning with the sunlight coming through the windows, it is particularly lovely,” says Jamieson.

But while having a gigantic palace to yourself can be a dream, sometimes it’s nice to have people around. Especially at mealtime. “While the facilities [in the kitchen] are state of the art, they can be rather daunting for a beginner,” admits Jamieson.

And while the castle’s George V dining room is usually a highlight of any guest’s stay, with locally sourced tasting menus served under Waterford chandeliers, having it to yourself can be a little lonely. “The George V fine-dining restaurant is normally so full of life,” says Jamieson. “The fact it was only us in the restaurant just felt wrong.”

Jamieson and Smith instead prefer a good game of Monopoly, or pairing wine from the cellar with snacks and screenings in the hotel’s 1920s throwback cinema, with their choice of 32 plush velvet seats. They’ve worked through “Game of Thrones” and movies like John Ford’s 1952 classic “The Quiet Man,” starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Much of the movie was filmed on the castle grounds.