TAKING HIGH ROADS AND LOW ROADS THROUGH IRELAND : In County Kildare, cocooned in baronial bliss among the horsy set at the superposh Kildare Hotel and Country Club

At the risk of sounding snobbish, I am not a bed and breakfast type person. I do not like my morning tea with strangers seated around a sturdy pine table, slurped from thick, hand-thrown mugs. Let it arrive on a tray, poured from a Limoges pot, toast standing like soldiers in a silver rack, a red rosebud for a splash of color. I like crumbs in the bed when I leave it for the day, and I’ve left them in some lovely establishments.

This bank-breaking habit has taken us to hotels such as the Gritti Palace and the Cipriani in Venice, Im Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna and Hong Kong’s breathtaking Regent.

And now, Ireland’s newish Kildare Hotel, an ordered little dominion that takes your pleasure very seriously, as my mate and I discovered on a visit late last August.

Hotels themselves are a relatively new enterprise in Ireland where, until the mid-1800s, tiny wayside inns were the order of the day, offering little more than a stable for the stallions, a pub for a pint and a soft place to lay your head.

Today’s travelers to these gentle shores, however, include a sophisticated set seeking gourmet repasts, genteel sports and elegant swaddling. There has been a vast chasm between what they sought and what they got. Then along came the Kildare Hotel and Country Club, a Relais & Chateaux and Exclusive Hotels member, with a standard so lavish nothing in Ireland can quite compare with it.

The challenge, say the owners, the Smurfit Group Corp., run by Michael Smurfit (whose family is Ireland’s answer to the Rockefellers), was to create a world-class hotel with a uniquely Gaelic atmosphere. True, the countryside hereabouts is dotted with Georgian- and Regency-style inns, comfy and sweet, but far from grand. You could not compare the very best of them to Scotland’s Inverlochy Castle, or England’s Cliveden Hotel, Sharrow Bay Country House, or Chewton Glen, all paragons of virtue in which we have stayed and that never fail to impress.

Surprisingly, though, after my husband and I stayed there, we decided the Kildare may be the closest to perfection we’ve ever experienced. Its staff and managers appear to stick to their own golden rule: High-paying guests should arrive armed with lofty expectations and prepare to have them met, not with a curt smile or deferential nod but with an almost ennobling reverence.

Located 30 minutes and 17 miles from Dublin and sprawled on 330 acres, the Kildare boasts an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course, sybaritic health spa and the country’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, the Byerley Turk. Opened in 1991, the “K Club,” as it’s locally known, is a sensual feast for eye, ear, taste, touch and smell. Everything looks bucolically beautiful; peace reigns throughout. It is, in fact, confoundingly hard to pick the bones out of the place.

A genuinely warm spirit of hospitality is what sets the Irish country house hotel apart from its British or French cousins, an ardor that welcomes the stranger without question. And even within the Kildare’s sumptuous environs, that quality is present.

Unlike drafty stone castles and ancient rambling manors that have been merely half converted to accommodate overnight guests, Straffan House, the Kildare’s centuries-old historical setting, was entirely re-made and added-to in a resoundingly successful architectural style that defies you to guess where the old manor ends and the new wing begins.

The main building, where the majority of guest rooms and suites are located, is an edifice rex resembling a French chateau more reminiscent of the Loire Valley than an Irish county. But the classic grand theme frees the guest rather than confines. You want to ramble through these halls and are encouraged to do so. You can walk to the very end of a corridor to examine one of the splendid Russian oil portraits on display, or climb to the third floor to admire the view from bow windows of the sculptured gardens below, the River Liffey and legendary Hill of Allen in the distance beyond.

Be aware, however, that your fellow guests are of the Hermes golf bag and cashmere pullover ilk, a preppyish club of East Coast Americans, English lords and Irish bankers. (Their royal guest just last weekend was Monaco’s Prince Albert.) Venturing out in the early morning air for a quick run when everyone seemed fast asleep in their linen sheets, I hastily threw on a pair of old bicycle shorts and faded sweat shirt. Much to my chagrin, I returned to find a lobby full of the country club set, decked out in their softest flannels and silks. I bet the staff at the desk had never seen anyone bolt up that sweeping center staircase so fast.

In the Presidential Suite across from us, a young golf-playing couple from Valley Forge, Pa., was ensconced with their young daughter and her nanny in tow. But the most memorable, and by far most vocal fellow guest was a flamboyant Bea Arthur look-alike who spent her days combing the area on an antiquing safari with a tiny, spectacled male furniture expert always at her side. Like characters in a play, they’d walk into the public rooms, the massive lady delivering lines such as, “Didn’t we find the most fabulous armoire today! It was worth spending this extra week, wasn’t it?,” in a booming staccato. The meek fellow would nod, glance nervously about, and they’d exit, stage left.

Everything at the hotel, from the fragrantly heady gardens to the chambers of velvet, brocade and plush carpet are designed to effectively smother stress. And if, perchance, after a few days of this stupefying coddling you feel lethargy setting in, your pulse will quicken and the blood rush to your head when management presents you with the bill. The Kildare is an extravagance (double rooms in the main house start at $309), but sublime.

The county itself, one of eight in this East Midlands area, is named for the Gaelic Cill Dara , meaning “church of the oak.” It’s the nucleus of horse country, and vast, grazable grassland is delicately embroidered with Europe’s prime stud farms, mostly owned by Irish “old money” and oil-rich Arab sheiks.

The approach to the Kildare itself is a rural road, cutting through the hamlet of Straffan, curving past a tiny sweet shop, a petrol pump and an old stone church. Just before a low bridge, the iron gates of the property swing into view, a majestic “K” in gold on each side. (The town of Kildare, larger than Straffan, is actually about 20 miles away.)

It’s obvious why County Kildare drew the late 19th-Century Romantics, led by Sir Walter Scott, to its wooded landscape with dreamy bowers and lush trysting spots, the better to compose love’s purple prose. James Joyce, educated at nearby Clongowes Wood College in the town of Clane, set the opening of his “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” there. Kildare is, in fact, a crossroads for artists of all sorts, so chic of late that it’s in danger of becoming downright fashionable. Perhaps it’s the fact that nothing much has changed in the last 50,000 years that’s luring “blow-ins” (resident jet-setters) such as rockers Eric Clapton and Ron Wood.

At the hotel, a veritable mini-museum’s worth of 20th-Century pictures are hung with a perfectionist’s eye, including a whole room designed around their Jack Yeatscollection (poet W.B.’s brother), with valuable Russian, Colombian, English and Irish artifacts elsewhere.

The same attention to detail is evidenced right down to the flower arrangements and writing desks in each of the 45 luxe guest rooms and suites. A smattering of self-contained apartments, like tiny 18th-Century villas, are also available in the former manor stables, and an impressive three-bedroom lodge can be had for the right price. Our suite, in the main building, looked like the set for a Ralph Lauren fashion layout, with a marble bathroom you could park a Daimler in, and service to match: No pillow went unplumped, no towel unwarmed.

Each room is individually decorated, and some have been painted by mural artist Don Knox. My favorite public room was the olive-sized cocktail bar next to the restaurant, a Maxfield Parrish pastoral pastiche of blue sky and puffy white clouds to shelter the drinker. Another artist, Naomi MacBride, did a stellar job hand-painting the Chinese Drawing Room, one of several areas where guests can loll about sipping tea or after-dinner liqueurs, warmed by a blazing turf fire and plenty of back issues of “Country Life.” But, it’s the paintings and sculpture that most impress, important works lining the halls, public rooms and guest quarters.

Art of another sort is practiced in the Kildare’s kitchens by bona fide stove star Michel Flamme, who has stamped his French brand on a new wave of Irish eating. Ireland has never received high marks for cooking. For centuries, it was either feast or famine at the table, and when the gentry produced a “proper meal,” it was with dishes such as pickled fish and turkey pout.

Nothing so gauche appears on the oversized designer plates in the hotel’s Byerley Turk Restaurant, named for a revered stallion whose lineage runs throughout the world’s finest thoroughbred bloodstock. His massive portrait covers one entire red-brocaded wall in this columned room, surrounded by starry chandeliers, severe portraits of peers in powdered wigs and rolling views to the river.

Dinner is a dress affair here, a slightly pretentious ritual that manages to recreate with old-fashioned decadence the old days of the great experience gastronomique. The international menu is hipper than that, however, emphasizing simple-but-perfect creations where freshness is the key. Everything from salad greens to berries at dessert hail from the estate’s own gardens. Our first night at the hotel, we shared a tranquil meal at dusk, accompanied by a black-gowned harpist and attended by a staff of formal-suited waiters. So formal, in fact, they even brought a brocaded stool for my tiny evening purse to rest upon.

Come the Sabbath, locals decked out in their best suits, hats and handbags appear from Dublin and nearby villages for a traditional “Sunday lunch,” as prevalent here as in England. Compared to the simple surrounding villages, the Kildare’s beauty is almost daunting, yet its owners press everyone to visit, even just for coffee or tea and viewing the pictures or strolling the gardens.

The hotel and its cream-colored golf clubhouse are artfully placed among lime, oak and beech trees so that nature is rarely disturbed. This can drive golfers mad on the trickier holes (like the dreaded 18th, dubbed the Hooker’s Graveyard), but pleases the conservationists no end.

The formal panel garden stretches from the main house to a fountain and pool with granite cherubs near the riverbank. Tripping down these bordered stairs is like stepping into a Constable landscape, and I wandered the curve of lawn to a 19th-Century white suspension bridge spanning the Liffey and shaded by a fantastic red-fruited tree. Known as the Hawthorn, this particular variety is associated with the “little people”: Locals refuse to fell a Hawthorn lest they incur the wrath of the fairies and are forever cursed.

A secretive delight is stumbling upon the walled kitchen gardens where the hotel’s food is organically grown. Wandering on, I met some wild pheasant, and wound up back at the river, where a familiar figure in khaki struggled to retrieve a stray shot from the murky depths. Too frustrated to muster much of a greeting, my husband nevertheless praised the challenge of the K Club’s course.

No self-respecting manor would be complete without a croquet lawn, taken over during our visit by three giggling little boys in short pants and knee socks who turned somersaults on the grass after every shot. If croquet sounds too pedestrian and pheasant hunting--it can be arranged--too beastly, you could attempt the club’s clay-pigeon shooting or try horseback riding, set up for us at neighboring stables. The ride through the woods and fields of tall green grass almost made me forget I wanted a swim and massage back at the hotel’s health spa.

Located in the main hotel for easy access from rooms, the spa has an indoor pool lit entirely by chandeliers, a healthy juice bar, sauna, massage and beauty treatments. It’s a stunning facility, but also, alas, the one snag in the velvet cocoon, so to speak. I found that male and/or golfing guests were treated to much better service at the primarily “old boy”-style golf clubhouse, while many female-oriented services are not as readily at hand. Example: I phoned early in the morning to arrange a massage and manicure, and the polite spa receptionist said she’d phone me right back with an appointment time. Hours stretched into late afternoon, and no word, so I went down to the spa, only to find no record of any request, no masseuse, no manicurist.

A mile of the River Liffey is owned by the hotel; the river accompanies you down the fairways and beyond, and is often stocked with salmon and brown trout for which guests fish. In the 19th Century this was one of Ireland’s premier fishing waterways and thanks to the hotel’s re-stocking, it now lures eager anglers such as part-time country squire Mick Jagger, an Irish landowner himself.

The fact that the K Club rests within 30 minutes’ driving distance of every major race course in Ireland did not escape us, and given the choice between touring famous literary sights and playing the ponies, I’m afraid the beasts won out. Besides, a day at an Irish meet will offer more in the way of true Irish culture than any tour of Joyce’s former haunts can.

Society in this country is far from classless, a fact most clearly evident at the Irish Derby, held every summer at the Curragh, a legendary racecourse near the K Club. Two seasons ago during my first Ireland visit, we had the good fortune to attend this see-and-be-seen soiree, which took place this year June 26. The attendant smart set, dressed for a Merchant-Ivory film, fluttered their designer wings, nibbling cucumber and salmon sandwiches and swilling “champers” (Champagne) under billowing white tents, despite the inclement weather.

With Dublin so close to the Kildare, it’s easy to pop into the city for an afternoon’s shopping and dinner, and if you don’t rent a car, the hotel provides transportation, as they did for us. But the strong smell of seaweed in the briny air, the constant tolling of tower bells, and the bustling hordes of trendy young things seemed too sharp a contrast to Kildare’s fresh breeze and deserted lanes, and we felt relieved to return long past midnight to the hotel.

As we headed up the grand staircase toward our suite, my feet dragging a bit after the city’s pace, we heard the soft voice of the night receptionist behind us, asking, “Would you like a cup of cocoa sent up before you retire, Madam?”

Why, they’d even removed the crumbs from my bed.

GUIDEBOOK: Keys to Ireland’s ‘K Club’

Getting there: There are no nonstop flights from LAX to Dublin, and most flights require a change of carriers in a connecting city. For example, American Airlines flies from LAX to New York’s JFK, changing to Ireland’s national carrier, Aer Lingus, for the flight to Dublin. The cost is about $950 round trip. The exception is Delta, which flies to Dublin from LAX via Atlanta for about $1,050 round trip.

The Kildare Hotel and Country Club is a 30-minute drive from the airport, and they will arrange for a car to meet you upon arrival. If you prefer to rent your own wheels, Hertz and other rental agencies have offices at the airport. (Check on discount rates for making reservations from the United States.)

Where to stay: The Kildare Hotel and Country Club (at Straffan, County Kildare, Ireland, telephone 011-353-1-62-73333, fax 011-353-1-62-73312, toll-free reservations 800-221-1074) has 45 rooms and suites. Doubles start at $309, including tax and use of most sports facilities and health spa (excluding golf and special activities). More reasonably priced “weekend rates” or “leisure breaks” are available. Courtyard suites, next to the main house, are about $265 per night for a double.

Where to eat: Breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon tea available at the K Club’s two restaurants, the Michelin-starred Byerley Turk, and the less formal Legends, located in the country club. Dinner for two at the Byerley Turk is about $80 without wine. Excellent room service also available.

Weather: Early summer through September is the safest bet, but always be prepared for drizzle--or a downpour.

For more information: Contact the Irish Tourist Board, 345 Park Ave., New York, N.Y. 10154, (800) 223-6470 or (212) 418-0800.