The Supreme Court has ruled that six valuable Harry Clarke stained-glass windows in Bewley's Café on Dublin's Grafton Street belong to the landlord of the premises rather than to the café operator.
In a judgment delivered on 18 February 2026, Mr Justice Maurice Collins dismissed an appeal by Bewley's Café Grafton Street Limited and its parent, Bewley's Limited, and affirmed the Court of Appeal's finding that all six windows are part and parcel of the building owned by RGRE Grafton Limited.
The windows were commissioned in 1927 from Joshua Clarke & Sons, where Harry Clarke handled stained-glass work, and installed in March or April 1928. Four are known as the Four Orders and two as the Swan Yard windows.
The ownership dispute emerged after Bewley's Café agreed in December 2020 to transfer the windows to its parent company while continuing to use them under licence. The landlord challenged that transaction.
The High Court had reached different conclusions about the two sets of windows, finding that the Four Orders belonged to the landlord but that the Swan Yard windows were removable tenant fixtures. The Court of Appeal later ruled that all six belonged to the landlord.
The Supreme Court agreed. It held that the Swan Yard windows, like the Four Orders, had originally been designed and installed to function as actual windows, providing lighting, ventilation and weather protection as well as decoration. The court rejected a theory that the Swan Yard works had originally sat inside separate clear-glass windows as part of a double-fenestration arrangement, finding inadequate evidence for it.
The court also held that Bewley's had failed to prove a separate threshold requirement for its ownership claim: that the tenant had paid for, or assumed liability for, the windows. Surviving records from 1928 were too fragmentary and ambiguous to establish that fact.
The Court of Appeal order recognising RGRE Grafton Limited's ownership was therefore affirmed.