30 Of The Most Atrocious House Listings From This ‘Ugly Irish Houses’ Insta Account

The creator of the account told Bored Panda they've always thought there should be some account or website calling out just how ugly many Irish houses are. "For such a naturally beautiful country, we've got a lot of ugly houses!" they said. "I so often physically stopped the car to pause and stare at the latest roadside abomination until I finally decided that it deserves its own Instagram account."

At this time, they discovered Ugly Belgian Houses, a project Bored Panda has already written about, and thought, "If the Belgians can do it, the Irish can do it even better!"

According to the person behind the account, if they were to create an Ugly Irish Houses bingo, these items would certainly be on the bingo card: red leather sofas, clunky deformed dining chairs, a cringeworthy home pub, a pool or snooker table in a cavernous empty room, a house surrounded by a sea of asphalt, Roman pillars often installed upside down, red carpets galore, a large framed photo of the house taken from a helicopter or drone, and a few other gems.

"If you were to compare us, the Irish, to most of our European neighbors, I think you'd have to agree that we are prone to making design mistakes, probably because the only references we have for architecture are castles, churches, pubs, and hotels... People seem to want to make their houses look and feel like one of those or a mix of all of them. Maybe it's also because in Irish schools, anything art or design related becomes optional after the students turn 11, so the Irish aesthetic kind of fossilizes at the end of primary school."

The account only features houses that are for sale on the open market, so no candid shots are taken from the side of the road. "Luckily, there's an absolute wealth of content on all of the Irish property sites, plus I have a fantastic community of ugly house fans who send me what they find on a daily basis."

(Not) surprisingly, even the showrunner lives in an ugly Irish house. In fact, it has even appeared on the account. "It's not ugly on the inside though!"

"I'd like to add that I'm not an architect or designer, and don't have any involvement with construction or design. I run this page just for a bit of fun and particularly during the last 9 months in and out of lockdown, it's helped my own mental health to have some kind of escapism, to have fun and interact with my followers in Ireland and abroad." Let's hope Ugly Irish Houses does the same for you too.