Dublin, Ireland

Wilder Townhouse

Price per night from$237.34

Price information

If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.

Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (EUR219.38), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.

Style

National velvet

Setting

Steps from St Stephen’s

Within strolling distance of Temple Bar and close to the Grand Canal, Wilder Townhouse hotel is a handsome red-brick retreat on a sleepy residential street in Dublin. Built during the Victorian era, its name nods to a time when Oscar Wilde once resided in the Irish capital. The dapper design would make any dandy proud: jewel-coloured velvet chairs, polished parquet floors and botanical-print wallpaper, with vintage silk Ottomans, wood-panelled walls and original fireplaces in some of the suites. The chic Gin & Tea Rooms stock an elaborate array of Irish gins and whiskeys – just the tonic for perfecting those erudite Wilde quotes. Sláinte!

Smith Extra

Get this when you book through us:

A G&T each in the Gin & Tea Rooms

Facilities

Photos Wilder Townhouse facilities

Need to know

Rooms

42, including four suites.

Check–Out

Noon, but flexible, subject to availability. Earliest check-in, 3pm, also flexible.

Prices

Double rooms from £213.36 (€249), including tax at 13.5 per cent.

More details

Rates don’t usually include breakfast (from €14.50 a person).

Also

All common areas are accessible for wheelchair users and there are specially adapted rooms available.

At the hotel

Free WiFi throughout. In rooms: TV, air-conditioning, free bottled water, Nespresso coffee machine, tea-making kit and Replica by Maison Margiela bath products.

Our favourite rooms

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the Shoebox rooms are somewhat snug, but if you travel light, there are worse places to rest your head. For a bit more cat-swinging space, go for a Popular, which will be roomier and have an original fireplace, walnut-panelled walls and a vintage silk ottoman.

Packing tips

Stuff your suitcase with first-edition Oscar Wildes and James Joyces, and don’t forget an appetite for Guinness.

Also

The Wilder’s original incarnation, when it was built in the 19th century, was as a home for retired governesses; you can still sense the air of erudition and enlightenment.

Children

All ages are welcome, but this one’s better suited to fully grown Smiths.

Food and Drink

Photos Wilder Townhouse food and drink

Top Table

Sequester a table on the terrace if there’s no Irish rain, or choose your favourite colour seat (teal, mustard, slate).

Dress Code

Dapper dandy and literary heroine.

Hotel restaurant

There’s no restaurant at the hotel, but you can grab a bite in the bar, and breakfast is served in the Garden Room every morning. There’s a choice of breads, scones and muffins, along with some cooked options, including smashed avocado with poached eggs, buttermilk pancakes and full Irish breakfasts.

Hotel bar

The residents-only Gin & Tea Rooms has red-brick walls, botanical-print wallpaper, parquet floors, deco lighting and jewel-toned velvet chairs. That may sound nice, but the most impressive thing is the extensive gin and whiskey selection. Staff will be able to fetch cheese and charcuterie boards, soups and sandwiches to help soak it all up.

Last orders

Breakfast hours are 7am to 11am. The Gin & Tea Rooms are open all day, from 7am until 11pm.

Location

Photos Wilder Townhouse location
Address
Wilder Townhouse
22 Adelaide Road
Dublin
D02 ET61
Ireland

The Wilder Townhouse is on Adelaide Street, a short stroll from the centre of Dublin, between Camden Street, St Stephen’s Green and the canal.

Planes

Dublin’s airport is a 45-minute drive away; the hotel can pre-book you a taxi.

Trains

The hotel is close to two of the city’s main rail hubs: it’s a 20-minute drive from Heuston Station and 10 minutes from Pearse Street. Staff will gladly pre-book you a cab.

Automobiles

The townhouse has a handful of free parking spaces (available first come, first served). Nearby street parking is also free between 7pm and 7am, and on Sundays. The hotel is perfectly placed slightly away from the action (we’re looking at you, Temple Bar), but within a five-to-10-minute walk of the centre.

Other

Ferries call in at Dublin’s port from Holyhead and Liverpool; it’s a little over 20 minutes by car from the port to the townhouse.

Worth getting out of bed for

Once you’ve worked your way through the Wilder’s gin collection, enjoyed a charcuterie board out on the lantern-lit terrace and read all of Ulysses (good luck with that), the centre of Dublin awaits, a 10-minute walk away. The shops of Grafton Street and buzzy brasseries of Camden Street are all within strolling distance. If you’re taking the James Joyce literary-holiday thing seriously, book a walking tour that pays homage to the writer and the city he loved to write about. Ditto if you’re going down the Oscar Wilde route: plot a voyage around Dublin in tribute to its famous son. Contemporary-art lovers will lose hours at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, on 48 acres of land in the city centre, on the site of the 17th-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham. It may be crowded with hen and stag dos, but Ireland’s most-visited tourist attraction is number one for a reason, and you’re bound to have fun when there’s pint after pint of Guinness involved: get yourself to the Guinness Storehouse.

Local restaurants

For coffee and croissants, duck into Network, a boutique brunch spot on Aungier Street. For the trendiest Thai in town, try Saba on Baggot Street, near the canal. Over on Camden Street, Pickle serves up Indian dishes that are almost too pretty to eat. On the same street, Delahunt is in another Victorian building, almost as fabulous as the Wilder’s, with a menu that focuses on seasonal local produce, with a whole lot of curing and smoking done on site; expect dishes such as roast chicken with sweetcorn orzo and wild mushrooms, and house-made black pudding with apple and quail’s egg. And if that sounds good, don’t miss Delahunt’s sister property Frank’s down the same road. The Wilder’s owners’ favourite Dublin haunt is Roly’s on Ballsbridge Terrace, where you can eat hearty homegrown fare (aged Irish beef, fresh Irish seafood).

Local bars

If you like your cocktails whiskey-based, head to Bar 1661 on Green Street; if you don’t, you’ll need the luck of the Irish to get through that list. And we shouldn’t really be telling you about it, but The Blind Pig is a (ssh) not-so-secret speakeasy manned by an award-winning mixologist.

Reviews

Photos Wilder Townhouse reviews
Kate Pettifer

Anonymous review

By Kate Pettifer, Miss Adventure

'Are you having ALL the sex?' reads a message from my sister: she’s in charge at home while Mr Smith and I enjoy a 48-hour fling with Dublin. 'All of it,' I reply, 'we’re channelling Connell and Marianne.' 

Let me correct any conjecture we’re star-crossed lovers à la Sally Rooney’s Normal People: you should switch first love for double-figures-married, add on a couple of decades age-wise, and adjust the action-tally to somewhere between that of Connell and that of his neck chain. 

The hero of this Irish yarn (non-fiction, natch) is our hotel for two nights, Wilder Townhouse. In my head this was a cute B&B in a close-to-town suburb, but the reality is that it’s far more hotel than guesthouse, with a three-storey red-brick façade that’s imposingly Gothic, and a location so well served by restaurants and bars, you may not need Temple Bar at all. Which in our case turns out to be a good thing… 

Our corner Townhouse Deluxe King is sumptuously dressed in shades of navy and deep green, and is best viewed horizontally from our vast and well-sprung super-king, to fully appreciate not only the distinguished decor but also the high ceilings and original fireplaces at this Victorian one-time home for retired governesses. 

On our first evening in the Irish capital, there are welcome G&Ts awaiting us in Wilder’s velvet-seated Gin & Tea Rooms downstairs (April means it’s not quite warm enough for the outdoor terrace tables just yet), which for this assignment qualify as obligatory research. 

Despite the formality-suggesting name-badge-and-uniform set-up at Wilder, the reality is far warmer – staff are as keen to chat or provide insider tips as they are to serve chilled goblets of the juniper stuff, alongside briny olives and moreish smoked almonds. If ever there was a reason not to linger, however, it’s Delahunt – a contemporary Irish restaurant in Portobello where we’re headed for dinner. 

As Mr Smith and I stroll along Camden Street, Spring is extending the evening light, and there’s a palpable Eurovision-like perma-cheer in the air, as tourists, students and clocked-off workers wend their way to drinks or dinner on this lively thoroughfare in Dublin 2. 

Delahunt’s setting is a Victorian charmer of original shop counters, polished wood and stained glass, with a sitting-room cocktail bar upstairs: on the ground floor, mahogany snugs installed during 2020’s apocalypse have stayed, and afford a cosy privacy as Mr Smith and I delight in chef-owner Darren Free’s five-course tasting menu. 

Precisely tweezered amuse-bouches are followed by still-warm soda bread – the warm-up acts for asparagus with brioche and a morel mousse; scallop and cod with ramson dashi, and meltingly good aged striploin served with a star-of-the-show short-rib pot-au-feu. There’s just about room for morsels of cheese and pretzel, but the rhubarb-orange-almond dessert is pure let’s-push-on gluttony.  

Connell and Marianne make a reappearance on Friday morning. By which I mean that we’re off to Trinity College – the backdrop for their university-era angst – only we’re hoping for enlightenment rather than heartache, with a tour of the library and a glimpse of the impossibly old illustrated gospels that are the Book of Kells. 

This particular thousand-year-old manuscript may be the work of Celtic monks, but it’s the university curators whose storytelling deserves admiration: as we dutifully trot around their tension-building exhibit, which gilds the Book’s origin story, I can’t help but be impressed by the resulting fervour that (irrespective of creed) we and our fellow visitors are all pouring upon these ancient folios. 

Saturday’s Guinness brewery tour (no points for originality) has a similar ‘emperor’s new clothes’ vibe: by the time I’ve marvelled at mash, wort and hops, considered a career change in cooperage, and swotted up on the black stuff’s famous branding – visitors all around me unwittingly providing free publicity for Ireland’s best-known export via a gazillion uploaded photos on social – I find myself full of admiration for this much-revered pint, even though I’d usually much rather sink a glass of Malbec. Well played, Guinness. 

The cobbled warren of lanes around Temple Bar is the traditional stomping ground of those in search of pints and craic, but our Friday-night foray there is unexpectedly intimidating: turns out my days of wishing to swim through a sea of sweaty drunk men to queue five-deep at the bar while too-loud folk music assaults my eardrums are behind me… We retreat to the safety of Portobello and a wondrous curry at leather-boothed Doolally on Richmond Street.  

By Saturday afternoon, our 48 hours in the Irish capital are taking their toll: we are literally hobbling around the city. Not Normal People-related sadly, we are hobbling purely because we have walked EVERYWHERE. 

Dublin, it transpires, is a very walkable city. We walk to its cathedrals (two out of three), around the castle grounds, over bridges criss-crossing the Liffey, and browse the shops around Grafton Street. 

Wilder Townhouse is an excellent basecamp for this, and I have no downsides to proffer – we experienced only spotless, comfortable lodgings and the cheeriest of staff. Breakfast especially, from the well tended continental spread to a perfectly judged eggs florentine, is the hotel’s strongest suit. Even pensive Marianne would find something to smile about at Wilder. 

You’ll also find Wilder Townhouse in:

Book now

Price per night from $237.34