A bromance between Ireland’s top plantsman, Diarmuid Gavin, and leading vintage picker, The Store Yard's David Keane, delivers an Adams auction that has everything you never thought you needed, and more.
What do you get when you put Ireland’s top plantsman, Diarmuid Gavin, with the nation’s top vintage picker, David Keane of The Store Yard in Portlaoise?
You get an Adams auction that is a sensory and visual feast. Adams Auctioneers, Dublin's House to Garden, which is now open for bidding, is a sale with on-site viewings at The Store Yard in Portlaoise this weekend, running from Saturday, May 16th to Monday, May 18th.
Make it a day out. The industrial-looking exterior of this large hub gives nothing away.
Inside, it’s a smorgasbord of architectural salvage, furniture, fixtures, gardenalia, and all set around a cool café where you can escape the ephemera to ponder your next purchase.
Film production designers love it, bar and restaurant designers love it. So do interior stylists.
Garden designer and TV presenter, Diarmuid Gavin, first came across the place years ago, after it won a coveted best shops award.
“I eventually got there and ogled a glossy green dresser,” Gavin tells Home and Style, on a break from filming next year’s Garden Rescue for the BBC. “I was too scared to ask anybody for prices.”
Gavin, currently presenting this year's Garden Rescue series, is a man who sees value in past.
He also practices what he preaches, having rescued Victorian cast iron pillars from a skip outside the Jervis Street Hospital when it was being renovated and turned into the Jervis Street Shopping Centre.
They were made in Bristol in 1895 by a Cork man who set up the Lyset foundry.
He used them to build a beguiling set of terraces at the back of this south county Dublin home.
A visit to the viewing at the Portlaoise premises will demonstrate just how Gavin sees things differently.
There are floral arrangements throughout the warehouse.
He found a like-minded soul in David Keane, a builder and developer who, out of necessity, turned a hobby into a thriving business.
When work dried up during the recession, he pivoted, travelling across Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe, with his art dealer pal, Noel Mel, who fine-tuned his eye.
The pair are creatures cut from the same cloth. They like beautiful things, have a twinkle in their eyes, and a sense of pizzazz that is served with a good deal of mischief.
Keane first partnered with auction house Adams on their House to Garden sale last year.
This year, it has grown in size, number of lots, and levels of interest.
Adams bused some of their best clients down to the venue last Tuesday night to view the lots in situ.
Afterwards, a multi-course meal was served, including soup served in tureens that came out of some of the country’s big houses, serveware found in storied mansions, bowls filled with Pimms and champagne on tap.
“They did a bit of a Downton Abbey and put on a feast,” says Gavin.
Gavin had a separate connection to Adams.
His grandad, Michael Gavin, worked as a porter there and that aspect of the family history featured in the gardeners’ appearance on the BBC TV show, Who Do You Think You Are? In it, Gavin interviewed the MD, Stuart Cole.
Keane had suggested to Adams that they get Gavin on board.
This year’s iteration is bigger, bolder and includes 482 lots.
These range from garden statuary to stone water troughs, sundials, hand-made vernacular farm gates, street lamps and lots of old Georgian and Victorian windows that Keane hopes buyers might use to build potting sheds.
There are Victorian cast iron and timber columns, breakfront bookcases, ship lanterns, fireplaces, two-tier and three-tier cupboards, the kind many upscale kitchen companies try to replicate, shop display cabinets, and a sedan chair that came from a Queen Anne house in Co Wicklow.
The 19th-century Italian model, lot 346, is guiding €2,000 to €3,000. Another must-see is the Roman marble bath, carved out of Carrera marble, that he found in Co Cavan.
There's even a storied Victorian bar that was taken out of Dublin's Olympia Theatre.
Keane’s favourite lots include number 168, a cast-iron five-bar gate that features vertical bars to keep the poultry from escaping. It has a stylised love heart on the latch that he believes was a wedding gift to a farming couple.
Gavin has his eye on lot 227, a pair of Italian ceramic lemon tree urns that are over one metre tall, and are guiding €2,000 to €3,000.
The French cockerel, which is a feature of the lead image, is lot no 66 and is guiding €500 to €800.
The timed Adams auction ends from 110 am on Tuesday, 19th May 2026. View the lots at The Store Yard, Kea-Lew Business and Retail Park, Mountrath Road, Kylekiproe, Portlaoise, Co. Laois, R32 TRK4, on Saturday, May 16th and Sunday, May 17th, from 11 am to 5 pm and on Monday, May 18th, from 10 am to 5 pm. Adams.ie
